Toward the Verge: Strider

Strider!

Strider is a word used here for ... Like literally ninja. You're a "strider" from a "strider" school which teaches you to strider people to death. It's weird. They also call you "Strider" like it's a name but you are also a strider from that strider school, and they previously sent other striders to bestride the stride-able but they failed in their striding leaving all possible stridering to you.

Or something? In Ninja Gaiden do they just call the main character 'ninja?'

I had actually played Strider on the Genesis slash Mega Drive back when I was a young'un, but I don't have any strong memories of it. Reading wikipedia on the history of the release, it sounds like it was considered very highly as games go and not a metroidvania at all. Strider, here, is a Metroidvania and thereby covered vaguely under the toward the verge sub-banner of games I've played.

I'm going to be honest in that as a genre goes or has gone for me this year, this has not been what I would call a pleasant set of games. Generally speaking what you end up with are a lot of games with dull hallways, mediocre enemy placement, boring gameplay. No sense of exploration, of 'opening up' the game world or progression.

Strider is both the best and worst of the games I played in this regard. I didn't write many reviews, since there are more than a few games I feel like I might go back to in the doldrums between the two great sales, when I'm not trying to grind out many a card. Strider is a mix of a lot of elements that really make me wonder how much better it would have been if it wasn't crippled by being lashed to metroidvania elements.

It is also apparently inspired by Shadow Complex, so man, did that ever make me not want to pick up Shadow Complex.

The coolest thing about this game is that the Strider's scarf changes color when you change plasma options. You won't notice this early on, since you don't get a plasma change for quite a while, but you can actually change it on the fly and it slowly flows out. A lot of the visuals pick up on this sort of subtle element while the rest of the game hesitantly sits down before drooling on itself.




I've never played a game I was more certain the designers never actually thought to themselves "is this fun?"

So much of this game is just not enjoyable, not designed to be enjoyable, and not really a challenge either. Just flailing around, disinterested and irritating, coupled to a terrible checkpoint system. There's so much where I keep thinking it is going to get better, but it never does. This is a really negative review, but it is mostly born of disappointment with a game that is so close to being great it ends up feeling far worse. Much like a B-movie that is so ridiculous as to be entertaining, Strider is an excellent game that takes itself just not quite seriously enough that every flaw is magnified tenfold. Strider looks REALLY good, for a Metroidvania, and it sounds really good. Strider himself can do a lot of stuff off the bat you wouldn't expect, and the game's sense of level design - when it works - is fantastic.

The visuals are excellent and the world Strider is in, from train stations to cloning labs to underground black markets, are all well realized and interesting to look at. Unfortunately, most of this is going on in the background, while the foreground art assets are a great deal lazier. It's not to say that any given screen shot looks bad from the front, but there isn't much of an attempt to unify the stylistic choices or to build a consistent them, or even to have much variety. I feel like the world design was allowed to do what it wanted, but the enemy design was just extremely limited.

The game starts sliding into mediocrity almost from the beginning. It takes a while to really get to the point where you're going 'really?' at the screen often enough, but it can and it does. The big problem is the controls are just too ambitious and require too much finesse. I mean, maybe if I was a ninja myself, but I am not a ninja. You play a video game to be a ninja because you're not a ninja. Otherwise you'd be doing other, sweet ninja stuff.

I'm not saying the game is hard, because while some of the boss / mini-boss fights vaguely are and will take a couple attempts to figure out what the designs intended, it has more to do with the fact it feels like the game was tested and designed with a different control scheme. For example, to go through a floor, you push down and jump (on some floors). If you then immediately jump from the platform, you are considered to have double jumped. But if you grapple forward a couple arms length, then jump, you are considered to have done some other sort of jump where you can double jump.

If you do one, you fall to your ... not death, but you get backtracked ... and if you do the other you can do the trick. There are constant elements like this, and getting the over-ambitious control scheme to flow is far harder than anything the game throws at you. When the controls work, it is glorious, but there's just so many finicky little elements to it. Don't get me wrong, Strider can do so much - he can grapple off walls, slide under enemies, do cartwheels over their head - and later expands to teleporting and double-jumping, and the control scheme is trying to allow all these elements to flow from one to the next. It simply can't do it, or I can't do it, given the xbox one stick just isn't THAT precise.

Mark of the Ninja does a lot better at making you feel like a ninja, but that has a lot to do with the combat.

This game has, bar none, the actual honest to saints worst checkpoint system I have ever encountered since the concept went mainstream. I can not think of a worse system, not in the last twenty or so years. You can not force a save and can't tell when it last saved, but I think it's when you start a ... Something? New section? I came back to the game after not playing it for a while and found it had saved before a boss. Well, that's pretty normal right? Games often save before a boss you're having trouble with.

One thing: I had beaten this boss and advanced forward into the next level. I didn't have much trouble beating the boss again, so I advanced forward and beat up to the next boss, playing for a bit longer then setting it down. And once again, it had saved before the boss I'd beaten. It turns out you only reliably save when you reach health stations, or something like that, and any other point in the game is more or less impossible to tell. It doesn't announce it prominently either, there's just a tiny little icon on the bottom of the screen. Sometimes it saves at check points. Usually before bosses. But not always! It will say checkpoint saved, but it won't actually save the game. It only saves a checkpoint, which isn't like saving your game.

I'm not kidding. It is surreal.

Enemy design in Strider is, I think, stylish in visuals but frankly sloppy and unpolished. For one thing, enemies just have too much health as the game progresses and there's too many of the exact same looking dude. Sometimes he has slightly different equipment? It is difficult to discern if a dude is a big deal or just some foot soldier, assuming you're supposed to be able to at all, which I generally can't. The artists on this game did hours of amazing work but no one on the team ever decided to give the foot soldiers - gosh - wildly different hats. There are commonly only two kinds of enemies for 80% of the encounters in the game.

It also feels like you're supposed to dodge and be able to read upcoming attacks, but I just can't at all and the game ends up feeling incredibly clunky. Enemies can stun you, sometimes, and attacks might or might not or all sorts of dumb things. Sometimes you flop out of the air, sometimes you don't. There is a very common shield enemy that you need to charge your sword for a split-second to break through. However, they usually come with another enemy, and you end up bouncing off the shield a lot when you're just trying to get through the area onto the next. When you're charging, enemies will knock you out of the charge, so getting in close is a bit of a dance. I don't know why you would program enemies to knock you out of the charge, it just adds to the hassle and breaks the game up further.

I mean this would be fine if they weren't all that common, but they are in nearly every room and they constantly respawn as you go from room to room. So you end up running around holding a charge, but that rarely helps, since you have to hit the first guy (why is the guy WITHOUT the shield standing in front?) and then pause to kill the shield guy and then move on, probably to the next shield guy. It is a pattern of breaking up the game's pace repeated over and over. It's like going down the highway and constantly hitting speed bumps.

Uptime in general is something the game doesn't understand. It isn't fun to wait around to be allowed to do things, but many of the bosses and fights rotate around patiently waiting for the enemy to telegraph an opening or leave the background or whatever other obnoxious nonsense. A lot of the game, frankly, ends up feeling extremely boring. Combat looks visually slick, but it's painfully dull. It's dull compared to Super Metroid, and it's dull compared to modern gaming, and it's just dull. It's probably dull compared to Strider's arcade origins. Enemies don't really have much feedback - it is hard to pick up on their patterns and they seem vaguely perturbed by your attacks up until they explode and die. There's no feeling of weight to your actions at the start of the game and never a feeling of weight as you move forward. The only thing you get more of as the game goes is enemy's knocking you down, which is the opposite of fun.

In fact, unlike most metroidvanias, if you go back to the start of the game (which you do for one of the last quarter bosses) you find the enemies are ... Just as tough and annoying as they always were. There is no sense of progression or avatar strength in this game, besides some improvements in mobility that don't feel like much since Strider probably starts off a little too mobile.

Boss fights are ... Incredibly weird in Strider. You know I started off the Toward the Verge series way back when off playing Super Metroid, and I admit there is some pretty hardcore all-in nostalgia guiding my love of that game. And I do love that game, even if the Kraid fight is kinda crappy and so on. Boss fights here range from feeling really cinematic to weirdly rehashed with odd ass hard to dodge mechanics that don't make sense the 5th or 6th time you've stared at the screen going "which precise button press is supposed to dodge that exactly?"

The voice acting is bad even relative to the dialogue

It also does that thing where it does stupid cutscenes before the fight. I can just never figure out why developers think that's when characters should talk. If you want to do something cinematic, come up with something cinematic, not something that grabs the pacing and immersion by the throat and batmans it bane style. Whatever that means. (it means it breaks its spine and it spends untold time in some vaguely russian prison)

Seriously though, for a game obsessed with looking cool, very few of the boss fights are really any good at doing it in motion. They just feel floppy and weird, with a lot of goofy mechanics that either telegraph too well or not at all. They do look good at a glance, but the actual gestures you're going through on the controller just feel obnoxious as Strider flops around on screen. A lot of them just feel like doing raid encounters, but coupled with the irritating finicky elements of the control scheme and overall sense of dullness, you just wish you weren't.

Visually Strider can be stunning, but as a game experience I started getting pretty cripplingly bored about three or so hours in. It just turns into a long, meandering trek through a hard to remember set of vaguely connected dungeons. The visual polish makes the sloppy controls and awful level design really stand out, and just makes me want to go do something else, and ultimately just led to frankly not wanting to play the game anymore.

I don't even know what else to say. I keep meandering as to my point, but it's just so slippery! It's like the controls! Five hours into this game I'm just exhausted with it. I've been bored for two hours of playing and it just keeps getting more boring. I'm not even stuck on some difficult section, I'm just running toward some poorly explained doodad and doing the snorefest trash mobs, and I just don't want to bother playing anymore. The voice acting is so obnoxious in this game, too, it's just terrible and completely jarring in contrast to the visuals. It's like the art department was 95% of the budget, but they ran out at 65% and forgot to put in different enemy models before using random people for voice acting that sounds weirdly offbeat.

seriously, I think the VA for this was a janitor

Anyway I wouldn't say this is the worst game I've played all year, but it's just so disappointing. When the game gets it, it really gets it and you're having a blast. Then you're back to running through hallways, banging your sword off shield guys and falling asleep in your chair before some awful voice acting cuts in. It just gets everything bad that can be bad about Metroidvanias without any sense of exploration or wonder.

Up next: my most positive review of the year!