The work season begins and it’s time to go back to our scrap collector position. But this time it will not be the same as always: our compan
y plans to go to a different destination, very far from our galaxy. A place from which no collector has returned alive. The rewards are imm
ense but the risk of dying is also, and even with those you know that you have to take the risk. You try to contact the main ship, Icarus, but you do not receive any return transmission. You decide to take a gun and see what happened in Icarus with your own eyes.
With this pretext and without much importance during much of our adventure, we start Strafe, a Roguelike FPS who drinks a lot of classics like D
oom, Quake or Wolfenstein. The nostalgia factor will not be left alone with those examples: throughout our adventure we will see that the gam
e has developed with the decade of the 90s in mind. Either by its visual section, by its component shooter, by its exceptional BSO or by many other many references, is a game that will try to attack the nostalgia of most of our adult readers.
Son of a gun
We are faced with a frantic style of play, where we will have to move constantly simply because we face hordes of enemies that never seem to end. Blood and guts will be the order of the day, and what better to have a large arsenal for it. We will have a wide variety of weapons, both primary and secondary. We can choose our main weapon before starting our game, and we can
not change it at any time. We have 3 main weapons that will try to cover any type of need: shotgun, assault rifle and railgun. Each of these weapons
will have a different role to each other. If we want to face in direct combat, the best option is to choose the shotgun or the assault rifle, but if what we like is to maintain the distances, the railgun will be our friend.
All main weapons will have a primary and secondary trigger mode. For example, the shotgun will have the short range shot that we can all expect f
rom a weapon of the style, but in exchange for spending a little more ammunition we can use a secondary shot that can cover long distances or more
enemies. Thus, each of the main weapons has two types of shots that are totally different from each other and that offer different ways to face the fighting. These two types of shots can be changed if we find an improvement position, and as we say this will make each game unique in that aspect.
Apart from all this variety of main weapons we will also have secondary weapons that will be scattered on the map. Its use will be limited and unlike the main ones, you will not be able to improve them. As we can expect in a style game, there will be no automatic regeneration of health and as an extra we will also have a shield that will act as protection. We can only rec
over health or shield with the obtaining of these elements, that we can find scattered by the map or when falling of the enemies. We can also improve the damage per second, accuracy, loader and the speed of the bullets. These improvements will be applicable to both main and secondary weapons. At certain times we will find small sales pla
ces where we can spend the scrap we have found in the form of more ammunition, or partially regenerate the shield. Said scrap can be conv
erted into real money, which we will use in stores to obtain other types of improvements, ranging from improving speed, adding a double jump, adopting a robot companion, etc. It must be said that once you die, you lose all progress you have made, so no improvement will be maintained in our next game.
Randomness not so well taken
All these improvements and objects will appear completely random during our journey. The scenarios will be created procedurally, that means
that no scenario will be the same. In total we have 4 areas, divided into 3 zones. Each of these areas will have a different setting, with different types of enemies that will have a different attack pattern. And here comes one of the big problems of Strafe, although the design of levels in the first bars is excellent with closed spaces that ad
apt perfectly to the style of play, as we go forward we will see that the scenarios are becoming more open, and it is something that does not quite m
aterialize with the type of playable proposal offered by Strafe. The fact that we are in more open and worse designed scenarios only makes things easier. When you play a Roguelike, you expect that the more you advance, the harder you w
ill have it, but in Strafe the opposite happens. Things like these are part of the main axis of the genre, and if you do not comply with it, all the good that you have achieved with the game, goes to hell.
