Strife: Veteran Edition Reviews

Strife is a very ambitious, but not very fun game. Sometimes the game is successful in what it tries to innovate on, and sometimes it is not, but the developers did not seem to focus enough on gameplay. This remaster is no doubt the best way to experience Strife, but consider these shortcomings well before buying. PROS: - Lots of innovation on the stock Doom engine, incorporating many RPG elements for the first time - Okay length, taking around 5 hours to complete - Great remaster CONS: - Game is really let down by its weapon lineup, which range from useless to hyper-specific - Enemy variety is extremely poor, with most enemies able to kill the player in a few hits - Poor level design and little environment variety

I really wanted to like this, but it's way too unintuitive. I feel like I would need to follow a walk-through the whole time I'm playing it. It felt like it was going to be a very long time before I started having any fun. I just want to shoot things in the face while bikini vampire babes in cheer me on, & it didn't seem like that was going to happen any time soon, so I got bored.

Very short version of my thoughts because of Steam's character limit: It's nowhere near deep enough to really be considered one of the original proto im-sims (that would correspond to games like [i]Ultima Underworld[/i] or [i]System Shock[/i], which preceded it), but it's a very uniquely fun and enticing RPG-flavored twist on the classic DOOM mechanics, and if you find any part of it interesting you owe it to yourself to check out this remaster by the gigachads at Nightdive. Extra shout outs to the random Aztec iconography and architecture you can find in places, and the fact that this game is finally getting its due after getting done dirty by [i]Quake[/i] coming out the month after its initial release (hopefully we can say the same about the Steam version of [i][url=https://store.steampowered.com/app/1647550/NEO_The_World_Ends_with_You/]NEO: The World Ends With You[/url][/i] someday)

I was drawn to this as the intersection of FPS/RPF mechanics crossed with boomer-shooter. The story is pretty basic, but it gets the job done, and the voice acting injects a lot of character. Decent challenge on medium, the weapons are fun and everything, especially the super-weapon. I wish there was a bit more variety on the enemies, but what's there is cool. I was really impressed by the world and how it felt like a real space. The way maps are interconnected and loop back on each other is really neat! It held my attention for 10 or so hours. Might replay for the bad ending in the future.