STRAFE
This retro gore-slicked shooter is all Doom and boom
The routine goes thusly: walk forward. Grab shotgun. Climb stairs. Through the doors, launch forward into the blue teleporting pad and… well, exactly what happens next is at the mercy of the code. We might sprint left then left again into a room crawling with acid-spewing aliens, or straight into a narrow corridor where we’re rushed by swarms of swipe-happy demons. But there is one constant in this procedurally generated retro FPS – blood.
It’s squirting out of neck stumps and covering the walls, dripping from the ceiling and pooling around stampeding feet. Gratuitous? Far from it. Strafe’s never-ending showers of viscera serve far more than your bloodlust. In the winding, random hallways, the carnage you blaze acts as a yucky breadcrumb trail, reminding you where you’ve been and what you’ve fought – and showing you where you have yet to go. Eat your amateur hearts out, Hansel and Gretel.
THE ACID TEST
And as we speed through the sci-fi environment, twitching, spinning, and firing at the first sign of danger, another use for all this glorious haemoglobin becomes clear. Stepping in the corrosive upchuck of UFOs hurts our health bar and impedes our frenzied bouncing; baiting enemies over them for a good slaughtering coats the acid so we can safely proceed.
And just like its spiritual big bro – last year’s Doom remake – ‘proceeding’ is very much the point of, er, proceedings. Strafe feels like liquid lightning in the hands, the fuzz and throb of its soundtrack everywhere as we hurtle towards probable death.
When it comes, it’s back to the beginning again. Time to mix up the routine with a machine gun and running a new gauntlet… straight into a stampede of terrors. But our secondary fire pumps out grenades – that persistent gore doing a wonderful impromptu decorating job – and then we spot a clean staircase to climb.
Health packs are difficult to come by, and power-up crates sometimes hard to spot amid the chaos. More focused is the wave-based mode we jump into next, the clinical arena soon turning crimson as we blast through the slavering chum. A jukebox blares our chosen tune. The classic ’90s FPS action gets its personality from these fun little touches – we even find a playable retro-game-within-a-retr-ogame secret in the starting chamber. Okay, so there are two constants in Strafe: blood, and surprises.
“THE CARNAGE ACTS AS A YUCKY BREADCRUMB TRAIL.”