A cool core combat that is seemingly just made more cluttered and messy for the sake of a metroidvania style progression at odds with itself. "Oh cool I discovered a secret, what do I get?" a piece of concept art...
The combat starts so elegant and ok maybe a bit easy with how deadly you are but still the enemy progression does help to ameliorate this. But then they just keep handing you more and more tools, most of which are either pointless cause in the heat of battle you wont remember you have them or worse, made purposeful only by the game forcing you to use them for certain enemies i.e "can't hit the enemy with the dorito shield unless you have the cool ranch powerup!"

I still genuinely enjoyed this game for most of the runtime, sure the bosses were kind of easy but whatever they were mostly cool. Anyways I didnt finish cause at what I assume is the final level they just suddenly ramp up a relatively easy game to bullshit "lets hit em with 10000 things to deal with" type challenge. This is usually manageable cause you're mobile and deadly and can take out the threats before they overwhelm you, not so much when these are big bullet sponges who spam projectiles that freeze you and you get stunlocked.

And Im sure Ill get a "skill issue" but I genuinely do not care, as I said the game had already far outstayed its welcome and even if I was just about to face the final boss I do not care, he can rule the world for all I care I just need to get this out of my system before I play something better

I very rarely drop games. Strider was one of them. I really wanted to like the reboot of such an iconic franchise, but it just doesn't click with me. This game is sorta like a Metroidvania, but it's level design is boring and rarely warrants exploring. As for the story, you're just dropped into the plot and told to go kill the villain. That's it. I understand that it's paying homage to the older games in the series, but it seriously needed an upgrade in the plot department. As for gameplay, it is fast-paced, but that's all I can say for it. At least until the point I dropped the game, your tool kit consisted only on spamming the attack button and using the odd charge attack to break through shields. Deflecting the enemy bullets with your attacks is fun, but considering Strider attacks so fast, you barely need any timing to deflect most of them. I was playing on Hard Mode, and the boss fights were piss easy, barely any challenge at all. They were fun and well designed though, just needed a wider moveset so the bosses aren't stuck repeating the same 4 attacks most of the time

Strider made a wonderful transition into the Metroidvania genre due to the immensely fun gameplay that has a rhythm to it with the combat which makes slicing up enemies so satisfying and with consistently getting new abilities/upgrades, it never gets old. Cherry on top are the boss fights that aren’t too hard, but still require a lot of attention that further elevates the combat.

My main complaint with this game is the visuals. It looks like an Xbox 360 Arcade title and just a downgrade compared to Strider 2. My other issue is that backtracking gets annoying due to the lack of fast travel options.

Overall, the gameplay carries this game so much to have a blast from start to finish to give it a strong recommendation if you are looking for a Metroidvania experience that makes you feel like a badass at a very low price which does make my complaints not sting as much. It is the best 3 euros that I have spent for sure.

Strider: 7.3/10 - Good

I was about to give this a bigger score but the ending really made me angry.
The last boss has a second phase with the gravity orbs that make strider a nightmare to control and if you quit the game sends you to the last checkpoint before the last area, something that is just a middle finger to the player.

I still enjoyed my time overall with it since the combat is fun and I enjoyed the way the animations make controlling strider fun but the two issues above knock this game down.

Strider is a metroidvania style action game. The game has fun combat, climbing on walls or on the ceiling is enjoyable and gives you more options during battle and exploration, there are some good boss fights, and the game has good level design that makes use of gravity, traps, and your ability to climb walls. Enemies you face are varied, being equipped with different kinds of guns and shields, there are also a good variety of robotic enemies and a few stronger soldier types to face. While there is a good variety of enemies, no matter what gun they have they are going to be dealt with in the same way, running up to them and slashing, often before many will get a shot off. This can make the game feel very repetitive when fighting enemies in normal environments, the abundance of health in almost every area and from defeating enemies also means that you probably won't care much about being damaged most of the time.

I think a lot of the games problems come from it being designed in a metroidvania style. You don't have a wide variety of moves, only unlocking different things that your sword can do, freeze, burn, deflect, and fire a ranged attack, unlocking the ability to throw kunai, a charged sword attack, and three special moves that drain your energy meter. All of these weapons and abilities are gained automatically over the course of the game, which is only about three and a half hours long, but you won't find your first sword upgrade until you are nearing the halfway point, the kunai are even further in, and the last sword upgrade is almost at the end of the game. You will have a fairly limited amount of moves for a game like this and the additional swords are mostly only going to be useful for breaking through the enemy shields that they are strong against, if enemies don't have a shield the plasma sword is almost always the best weapon to use. What little exploration there is will just be to find pickups to expand your energy and health bars and to upgrade your kunai, which are really usually only useful to hit switches as they are very weak in combat compared to the sword you have when you find them. A lot of the health and energy pickups are very easy to find and are on your way, the game ends up being pretty easy on the normal setting giving you little reason to go out of your way to find more, I had almost gotten all of them without even going back to old areas. The other reason to explore more is to find the bodies of previous Striders that allow you to change your costume and to find hidden collectibles that can add art, character information, or challenge maps to the extras and new game section. These give you no new abilities during the game, the lack of interesting upgrades can make you feel like you have little reason to explore the map, making a short game even shorter. There is nothing that interesting about the world or characters that will make you care about finding all the extra collectibles. I think the game would have benefited from a more linear design that started you with all or most of your moves and weapons and had a greater focus on making each area interesting and unique like Strider 2 did.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/654745157560963072
https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/654747160177586176

The best thing about Strider's 2014 reboot is that it retains and builds on the excellent way Strider controlled in Strider 2. Whether it's slashing, sliding or climbing, it all feels smooth here and the new additions to Striders kit like being able to dash, slash in 8 directions and charge your blade are all welcome additions. The bosses are also a high point of the game, with the best ones really encouraging the player to get to grips with Strider's moveset. Majority of the bosses are easier than I'd like them to be though.

Strider being so enjoyable to use makes traversing the environments extremely fun, even if the environments themselves are very bland. They're all gray and look identical, this would make backtracking a nightmare considering this game is a Metroidvania, but the game sports an excellent map feature so you never get lost.

On the topic of being a Metroidvania, the game doesn't do a good job at being one since it doesn't encourage exploration. That's because whenever you go out of your way to explore, all you usually get is concept art, story intel or the occasional alternate costume (which is just a palette swap).

If you play this like a sidescroller, then I think there's a lot of fun to be had here. If you play this like a Metroidvania, then the game feels pretty shallow, but even with that said, I had a good time with it.

this game felt really weird to finally beat, i got it for super cheap in 2015 and was really excited to finally play it on my shitty lame laptop which broke before i could finish it. i ended up going back to it in like 2018 or something, got about halfway through and again just kinda forgot about it and never finished it. this time i finally played it, and kinda just tore through it. took me less than 4 hours to complete! it was a solid time, but really nothing special. not much to say about this one even it's just a pretty generic metroidvania. combat is a bit mindless, controls are solid, movement feels fun, it looks alright, and has some fun bosses! the new powerups are also pretty generic, i wish the new forms of the saber changed up how it felt a bit more. the last one changes it up a bit but the other 3 are almost identical just with some elemental effects. not much else to say, pretty fun but forgettable!

Pretty decent reboot which is saying a lot in the era of Capcom it spawned from. Too bad they didn't care about the steam port which crashes constantly on my machine™ and I had to download linux related dlls to fix.

It's a metroidvania which to be honest, I straight up forgot til nearing the game's end. Just played it like any old Strider.

Not much to upgrades. Making it exploration based in general I felt didn't fit.

But overall, it's alright.

Strider is the most aggressively "pretty good" game out there. Physics feel pretty good, level design is pretty good, flow is pretty good, boss patterns are pretty good, spectacle is pretty good, voice acting is intentionally hilariously hammy with no sense of irony and I appreciate it. Some of the background art is nice to contrast the 2010's-era bland models, everything WORKS, this game would easily get an A in a game design course. The issue is that it really has no idea what it wants to BE.

Occasional moments of exhilerating platforming are often set back by dull segments of mashing the attack button through enemies. Neat movement upgrades like an omnidirectional air dash or a slide kick are never utilized except in specific points to make progress. You get a freezing attack that you use for platforming once in the whole game and then just use to break enemies who have blue shields that are allergic to ice but not explosions. You have a very fast attack that's satisfying to use and homages the old Strider well, but every single enemy has mountains of health that slows the power fantasy of the game to a crawl. There's a really neatly realized map of a futuristic eastern block dystopia that the game never has you explore by telling you exactly where to go at all times, and not in a Zero Mission "go to Ridley now" way, I mean a proximity alert to get to a checkpoint or screen transition. The game seems to realize that enemies can clip you for no reason and ruin your momentum, so there's tons of health pick-ups all around, even in the final boss fight, so you're very rarely in danger of dying. Bosses other than Solo are not reactive to your presence and just damage sponge their way through your attacks while you're only KINDA inclined to dodge theirs as you can probably tank through 80% of their attacks and still win unless it's a rapid-fire shot.

Strider is a game that has moments of fun; Strider inherently has a nice feel to him and jumps good. There are even some stretches that are legitimately nicely designed levels that work with the flow of the game. It is remarkable how a game can do everything so neatly and, through simple game design choices to make everything feel as standardized and fair as it can be, make for a dull, repetitive, forgettable experience for long stretches of its run time. I am not upset, I'm just disappointed.