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Ass quake meaning11/20/2023 ![]() ![]() The damage you incur in one level feels exponentially worse in the next one, as you cling to your last few points of health and begin creeping with your best, low-ammo weapon ready in case a random monster closet bursts open. Health and armor are typically scarce, with occasional bonuses appearing out of nowhere, and you'll often find yourself losing 20-30 percent of your total health+armor tally just by not accounting for a single bad guy in your blind spot. Not only do monster closets appear when you least want them to, but they're usually positioned in a way that their monsters can flank you from two or three angles if you're not careful.Īll these monsters pack a serious punch, so your games will end quickly if you're not careful. That list just describes the first few levels, and it doesn't even account for monster closets. Robo-spider-monkey things dot the ceilings, hoping to punish you for not picking them off when you might have had a vantage point earlier. Acid-spitting turrets appear on high points of walls, slathering the level in permanent, painful pools of orange acid until you take them out. Laser-shooting robots join the mix, and some of these are good at dodging. What's this I hear about the game being so hard, anyway? Pick 'em off through this funneled path, and that's it. Throw a grenade into one big room, and eight dumb peons-which all look like bipedal, hammer-wielding sloths-run directly at you down a big hallway. In some cases, you'll think that there's nothing brilliant going on. What Strafe nails so incredibly well is how its monster populations fill these spaces out-and how the geometry always makes the most of these dumb-as-a-rock enemies. ![]() The beauty isn't just that these remixed levels always look slightly different I really don't recall seeing giant stretches that looked identical between sessions. In Strafe's case, that means different '90s-looking corridors, stairwells, hallways, elevators, bridges, caverns, and more are continuously remixed and rearranged. Every other element is always freshly generated. They also each have their own unique grenade launcher, which uses up over half a mag's bullets per shot.Įach of Strafe's levels always starts and ends in the same way. Unlike Quake II, these weapons must be reloaded when their clips run out, and, if you reload while using a half-full clip, you lose those bullets. These should feel instantly familiar to anybody who has played Quake II, which had all three, and they have obvious strengths and weaknesses in terms of firing rate, effective range, magazine sizes, and so on. Time to kill.Įvery time you boot the game, you get to pick from one of three default weapons: machine gun, railgun, or single-barrel shotgun. The Weyland-Yutani vibe is immediate, intense, and shameless-and then that's it. She explains that you've been hired to explore abandoned spaceships and collect valuable scrap for a corporation. Need a plot? Eff you! You only get a cheesy VHS-styled tutorial, complete with a real-life actress doing a solid Brenda Walsh impression. Robo-spider-monkey things, bloodthirsty lemur-men The game wears its biggest issues on its blocky, voxel sleeves, almost as a badge of pride, and, as a result, it's not for everyone.īut no game in recent memory has done as good of a job letting players slide into their favorite memories of mid-'90s shooters-while livening up their pace and tension. Honestly, that list of gimmicks reads like prime fodder for Ars Technica's e-mail spam filter.Īnd yet, here I am, determined to convince you that this recipe for disaster turned out well. I've had a full week to play through so many bloody, '90s throwback levels of Strafe's first-person running-and-gunning, and I've had pretty much nothing but fun. It started as a Kickstarter, made by a developer nobody has heard of, with a reliance on dated visuals, cheesy advertising, and. You'd also be forgiven for looking at new game Strafe's list of qualities and insta-vomming. Math and procedural trickery don't make up for a game whose difficulty or boredom doesn't come with a payoff. Too often, these types of games rely on the gimmick of random content, as opposed to finely crafted, enjoyable experiences. ![]() Links: Official website / SteamYou would be forgiven for getting tired of procedurally generated and "roguelike" video games. Platform: Windows PC (reviewed), Mac OS, PS4 ![]()
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