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
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