Originally printed in issue 37 of TheSixthAxis, February 1996.
The first person shooter is changing. The latest 3D graphics are getting more and more advanced, the games are getting faster – might be time to buy a new mouse, little Timmy – and the small team of developers behind Strafe are right on the bleeding edge of this new frontier.
Heading out to the very edge of space, after being volunteered to join the ICARUS on its journey, you’re on a mission to get rich with scrap or die trying. Unluckily for you, as you return from a scouting mission, the ICARUS doesn’t respond to your hails. Grab a gun on your way to the teleporter.
It’s impressive just how realistic Strafe feels as you sprint through the corridors and rooms, exploring the randomised maps and gunning down every horrifying enemy in sight – did I mention they’re all mutants now? The way in which this world is constructed for you is truly staggering, as though the computer itself is an expert level designer, building everything from scratch every time you load up the game. Forget Star Wars: Dark Forces, or Final Doom – this is the ultra-realistic future of FPS!!
There are actual humans involved as well – your PC or PlayStation isn’t actually sentient just yet, whatever Gary Kasparov may think – and it’s they who have cleverly designed the rooms to be awesomely fun and engaging, but then filled them with randomised possibilities. Every time you play the game, it’s going to be put together differently. That’s right, it’s another of those games a little like 1980 adventure classic Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom, from making you start from scratch every time you play right down to having randomised levels and shop vendors.
Be prepared to have to reach for the top shelves if you want to buy this game at your high street video games retailer. It’s one incredibly gory game, with litres of blood spurting out from enemies as you shoot them dead, coating the floor, walls and ceilings in the red stuff. It’s permanent too, pushing your Pentium or AMD K5 to the limit as it keeps track of all the blood or alien acid blood.
You might start off fighting the mutated leftovers of the crew of the ICARUS, but get to the end of the level and you’re sent crashing down to the planet’s surface and the Black Canyon, to fight through alien bugs. In a revolutionary twist, you’re not hunting for key cards anymore to unlock doors, but hunting for timed explosives that you have to use to blow up new passageways before they blow up.
And you always start from scratch as well. As in real life, when you die, you don’t wake up in bed with a warm cup of cocoa, but are reincarnated at the very beginning. Luckily there’s no chance of being reincarnated as an ant for your sins, you’re always a guy that can kick arse with any gun he puts his hands to.
You pick from three guns as you set off into the fight, this futuristic setting letting you pick between a trusty shotgun, assault rifle or a handheld rail gun that the US military can only dream of putting in the hands of their jarheads.
Each of these also has secondary fire modes, like the rail gun’s big ball of explodable plasma energy, but you can be upgraded while out in the field by collecting the scrap dropped by enemies and feeding it all into a recycler – this is one eco-friendly game, guaranteed to be CFC free. You do have to feed that gun in at the same time, but it’s only a minute later that you get it back with things like laser guided missiles replacing the grenades on the assault rifle.
But you won’t be without a gun, as the upgrade machine’s clanking alerts and draws all the nearby enemies rushing towards you. Hunt around the levels and you might find yourself picking up other shotguns, plasma guns, even RPGs to blow stuff up with.
It’s all so gobsmackingly fast that it’ll fur your mouse ball in a matter of minutes. In the hands of one of the game’s masters, it’s an endless whirlwind of motion that pick you up and whisk you away. As soon as I pick it up, it’s a different story. I’m like a deer in headlights trying to simply move and shoot at the same time, but the tutorial’s excellent big budget FMV teaches you the game’s basics in a fun way ensure I’m hooked. I know I can do better and I know I’ll be sinking tens, if not hundreds of hours into mastering this, all the while rocking to the awesome music that’s so good you’ll be turning your Jagged Little Pill cassette into streamers!
Look, I know it’s still early in the year, that there’s a new Nintendo console out and the Japanese giant are bound to be doing amazing things, but I’m not being hyperbolic when I call this one of the best games of 1996.
Strafe is come out (again?) for Windows PC and PlayStation 4 on 9th May.
