Strider is a 1990s-style Metroidvania made with the technology and game design sensibilities of the 21st century. A solid and attractive platformer built around a rather nonsensical plot, the game runs the player through a variety of environments as they slowly unlock new abilities for the main character, allowing them to access more and more of the world in a fairly linear fashion.
This game takes the design of Metroidvania games and does it much better. Backtracking? There isn’t much of it here; the game is designed to take the player on a linear route through the world, and while it feels nice and convoluted, the overall amount of backtracking is very minimal. This is an excellent piece of game design that many other Metroidvanias could learn from; the only real backtracking required is a few areas which have to be unlocked by later abilities.
The core gameplay itself is pretty enjoyable. The platforming feels good, you can climb along the walls and ceilings, there aren’t too many bottomless pits, the enemies are reasonably varied, there are tons and tons of bosses (about one every half hour or so), with new enemies introduced like clockwork in the meanwhile. The game is always kept feeling fresh, and at the end, you get to put all your skills to work taking down the big bad.
The game has decent voice acting, but the plot itself is pretty much nonsense; it isn’t really clear what is going on beyond “There is a bad guy who is in charge and you need to kill him.” Who sent Strider? Who are all these people? Why is the big bad doing what he is doing? Who knows? Who cares? It doesn’t matter!
Your goal is to cut your way through his minions, and the game employs you admirably in this.
Overall, this is a pretty great game. The graphics ae solid, the game is the right length for what it is and doesn’t feel stretched at about 9 hours to 100% it, the protagonist has a reasonably diverse set of skills which can be employed in a few different ways to make your way through the levels and beat down the bad guys – if I had a complaint, it would be that the standard game difficulty might have been a touch on the easy side at times, but overall, it wasn’t really an issue. Checkpoints were pretty generous and never really felt like they set you back too far even if you did fail.
Was it perfect? No. But I had fun playing it, and the game had excellent pacing which kept me interested and kept me wanting to play after I got rolling through to the very end, even though it gave me many, many possible break points to choose from.
All in all, this is a great reboot, and the game was really quite fun and was worth the 9 hours I invested. It isn’t something with a great story, but the core gameplay was pretty much exactly what I was hoping for from a game like this.
5.0