Welcome to This Is Not A Review. In these articles we discuss general impressions, ideas and thoughts on any given game, but as the title implies, it’s not a review. Instead, it’s an exercise in offering a quick recommendation (or dismissal) after spending enough time to grasp the ideas and gameplay of a thing without necessarily playing it from A to Z.
The subject of this installment: STRAFE, developed by Pixel Titans and published by Devolver Digital.
HIGH Blowing away a whole squad of Forest Knights with a laser blast.
LOW The ubiquitous hacking is a lackluster twin-stick shooting exercise.
WTF The ending with the fish.
HIGH The sharply-paced opening sequence and its climactic cutscene.
LOW Competing in the awful, rubber-banded street races.
WTF Cops won’t reliably go after me for shooting a guy, but if I dent a cop car, they’ll gun me down. Just like real life!
HIGH Taking out an S.O.B. Purifier
LOW Losing everything because I took the wrong fork at the start of a level.
WTF This is the grossest take on Richard Nixon ever, right?
HIGH The boss fight against Kappel shows off most of the game’s best ideas.
LOW A boss fight where my controls got inverted and then I got stun-locked to death.
WTF Ergo singing a knockoff of the “Reading Rainbow” theme.
HIGH “We can never, ever come back to this city.” “Add it to the list.”
LOW This story again?
WTF How is it that the wheels on these ancient pirate crates still work?
HIGH Uniting the dopey lovers at the café.
LOW The runner level with the Ferris wheel.
WTF This skyscraper sure has a lot of exposed external wiring on it, huh.
HIGH Finally getting a decent ending.
LOW Basically any fight after about the first three playthroughs.
WTF You have sky pirates, magic gems, floating islands, and an anthropomorphic fox hero and the best title you could manage was Stories: The Path of Destinies? Seriously?
HIGH It didn't take long.
LOW A puzzle was so badly bugged that I had to restart a whole level in order to deal with it.
WTF Seriously, how does that even happen in a game this short and this thin?
HIGH The opening movie and game environment look awesome.
LOW Traveling between planets.
WTF Wait, so the human race is escaping evil aliens by moving to a planet in an area heavily patrolled by them?
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