STRIDER™ / ストライダー飛竜®

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One of my favourite metroidvania games I've ever played. I love the setting and the combat, and I like how helpful the game is at letting you find upgrades by showing them on the map when they're nearby, which promotes exploration and 100% completion, and saves you from missing something and regrtetting it later. It's not a long game, my first playthrough on normal with all collectibles and upgrades took around 8 hours, but once you've played through once that time will be dramatically cut down in future playthroughs. The game requires at least two playthroughs to 100% since completing the game on hard does not unlock the normal acheivement. This is okay though because you're best off beating the game at your own pace on hard and then doing your sub-4 hour speedrun on normal. I didn't do this because I'm a dumbass, so I ended up beating the game to 100% on normal, forcing me to either speedrun on hard or do an easy speedrun then another full playthrough on hard. After about 15 minutes of trying to speedrun hard I gave up and did the latter. Having played this game three times back to back I feel qualified to point out what makes it so great but also some flaws that I found annoying. The good: Combat is extremely fun. The face paced hack and slash really makes you feel like a ninja when you clear a room in 0.4 seconds, especially early in the game. The fact that virtually every wall can be climbed vertically (and horizontally) makes for a really dynamic experience in combat and gives you a lot of flow when moving quickly across the map. Like any good metroidvania this game rewards the explorer and the difficulty of your boss fights will be directly affected by how well you managed to explore and upgrade your gear, as is tradition. The world is big and had incredible design. The opressive soviet cyberpunk setting is one of my favourites I've seen, and a good art style makes the game age gracefully and looks sharp at 4K on a modern screen, even if the character models are still a bit low-res. The bosses are varied and well balanced. If you learn their attack patterns they're really not a challenge until the end of the game on hard difficulty. The less good: I think a lot of what bothered me about this game might come down to personal preference. I don't like how much the enemies attacks can stun you. This feels especially wrong in a game with so much focus on speed and movement to be knocked off walls by enemies so often. Especially during my easy level speed run I found myself frustrated by low level enemies knocking me down as I tried to rush past them. On a similar note I'm not a fan of the sections where you have to do platforming against a blowing wind. Enemies that use ice powers are also extremely frustrating, especially on hard, and again, I don't think that there should be attacks or abilities that slow the pacing of combat, but that's just me. Although the bosses were good, I feel like the camera in the final battle could be reworked. The only real difficulty in the final fight on any setting is how commited the camera seems to be to hiding the things you actually want to look at. As a PC port the in game maps seem to be a bit bugged, so a map can't be centered on the screen if its physical location is too far away (since the maps overlap on eachother in the menu). This makes some of the maps like the Kazakh City Outskirts unusable from locations east of the Tower, which can hinder your backtracking and completion. Additional notes: Keep in mind that the playtime for your run resets every time you die, and stops when you pause. Because of this and how well I knew that game at that point, you'll see that my hard playthrough was under 4 hours and I never really needed to do the 2 hour easy speedrun. Oops. Total play times; Easy (Speedrun) 02:18:13 Normal (All collectibles, all upgrades) 08:42:11 Hard (All upgrades) 03:12:36

A classic reborn. Simply AWESOME!

lol

Jogaço, muito divertido!

Pretty decent combat platformer. While it's just not on the level of classic Strider, it's fun for a bit. It's also often on sale with a deep discount.