Stride off
The core action gameplay of Strider (2014) is mostly solid, but a few fatal flaws make it more frustrating than its vacant story is worth.
First off: this is a bad example of a Metroidvania (more so than Headlander was). The world map is large and interconnected, but your path through it is almost entirely linear. Occasions to stray from the beaten path are rare -- there are optional upgrades for e.g. health, but not very many. Often, the game uses one-way obstacles - sometimes even re-locking an open door! - to prevent you from backtracking and force you toward the current objective.
I'd overlook the strict linearity if those objectives were narratively compelling, but they're nothing more than a series of techno-babble macguffins, serving the transparent purpose of taking you from one end of the map to the other. The story is bare as if to pay homage to the original NES game: it starts with zero explanation, there are almost no named characters (other than bosses), and even though I'm halfway through the game, I still don't know what the protagonist's motivation is.
Strider clearly doesn't care about storytelling, and wants you to enjoy the action for its own sake. And while its sword-slicing and -dicing is fun when it works, the game commits more than enough cardinal sins to dull its appeal:
- Checkpoint placement is both infrequent and unclear; death will often result in a surprising amount of re-treading.
- Cutscenes are unskippable, even (especially) the ones that precede boss fights, which you'll have to watch over and over again on every attempt.
- Bosses, and even some regular enemies, have an annoying tendency to effectively trap you with attacks that knock you back then fire again as soon as you're up; or bullet-hell-like attacks that feel like they come out of nowhere.
- And the controls just aren't quite tight enough to satisfy Strider's high-action ambitions. Specifically, running and ducking are both controlled by the left analog stick, and it's frustratingly easy to accidentally trigger the duck, immediately stopping in place.
Really, this feels like a decades-old no-frills action game with a nice coat of paint and some under-baked features tacked onto it. On balance, the action is "okay," but the rest of the game is simply not interesting enough to keep me going.
Better than: Forma.8
Not as good as: Gato Roboto
And in the "embarrassing technical issue" department: I had to play on my old PC, because my new build has too many CPU cores!?
Progress: the "Black Marketer" told me to destroy the "Gravitron" to access the "Temple."