A competently made Metroidvania with not a whole lot else going for it.
I got Strider as part of the Humble Capcom bundle earlier this year. After being disappointed with Resident Evil 0 and the Devil May Cry collection (apparently those games didn't age as well as I'd hoped), I booted up Strider just out of curiosity. To my surprise, I've put more time into it than any other game in the bundle, but that still doesn't mean I'd recommend it.
To the game's credit, it doesn't waste any time getting going. Strider shows up at the base of his target, and... that's it. Go kill dudes. There's a story going on, but it's completely meaningless. As far as I knew, the story was "go to point on the map, kill boss, go to next point on the map". And that's fine! It just means more time playing the game, which is exactly what I want. There are some cutscenes, and bosses will often talk during your fights with them, but the dialogue is completely disposable, with not a single memorable line in the entire game. There's so little effort in the story anyway, I'm surprised they bothered to write dialogue at all.
As for the gameplay itself... yeah, it's fine. I like how Strider doesn't slow down when he swings his sword, making it so he can dash at a group of enemies and slash through them without losing momentum. He's also a lot more maneuverable than your average Metroidvania protagonist, because he can climb up walls and across the ceiling right from the start. Considering speedrunners can get Samus to climb up walls with carefully timed wall jumps, I wouldn't be surprised if the devs decided to just toss the whole thing and design the levels with it in mind.
As a result, most of the upgrades you get aren't really movement upgrades, but more combat-oriented, with the added bonus of being able to break through to new areas. You get different types of blades, like fire, ice, plasma (the plasma blade sucks because you can't button mash it; I would switch to it exclusively to fight enemies weak to it and switch back to ice immediately afterwards). You get kunai knives that you throw to hit switches, though their range was too short for me to want to use them in battle. There are also spirit animals for you to summon, but the standard enemies aren't too hard to kill, so I'd only really use them on the bigger enemies that were more of a pain to fight. And of course, there are health and ammo upgrades, and unlockable concept art scattered through the levels because the devs couldn't think of more meaningful rewards.
The main problem with Strider is that nothing sets it apart. The combat is decent, it's nicely paced, with bosses and new upgrades given to you at regular intervals to change things up. But I've seen it all a million times before, and it lacks any moments that made me go "That was awesome!" The story was dull and the music was forgettable, with the exception of one track that I couldn't listen to without hearing "You used to call me on my cell phone."
Which might make a game worth playing through one time as a way to kill a few hours. I was actually planning on giving this game four stars for the majority of my playthrough, for at least being competently designed and not boring. But the last section of the game ruined it for me. After passing through the point of no return, I found the enemies suddenly got way more aggressive, and the skills that had carried me through the whole game were no longer good enough for this last wave. I don't mind a final gauntlet to test my skills before the final encounter, but that last difficulty spike turned the game from entertaining to frustrating.
The last nail in the coffin was an elevator ride up to the final boss area. At this point I'm introduced to flying enemies that spawn homing bombs with a huge blast radius that must be destroyed before they touch you. They take up a ton of room, and you have to contend with them as you also dodge gunfire from common grunts. Even worse, the bots that spawn these homing bombs tends to fly way up, requiring carefully timed jumps in order to hit them, a really difficult task when you've got bullets flying everywhere. This would be fine, but then you've got two giant robots that join the battle that shoot rapid fire homing bullets, and I only had so much magic to power my shield before I ran out and got torn to shreds. I played through this section for nearly half an hour, trying over and over, trying different strategies only to no avail.
After repeatedly trying different strategies and not having any idea how to get through, I realized that I no longer cared about what happened next. I had no attachment to the story. I doubted the final boss would be so amazing that it would validate my times with the game. I would get a trophy, a credits roll, and that would be it. My frustration with that elevator level put the whole game into perspective - I had so little investment that I was perfectly content to quit the game so close to the end, after I had crossed the point of no return.
My advice? Go play Axiom Verge or something.
