izigame.me

Strider is great, a 7/10. Here's the good news first:
1. Combat is fast paced and feels almost completely within your control. Movement feels fluid and fun.
2. The spammable basic slash attack very much makes you feel like an unstoppable super ninja from the very beginning. Charge strike also feels very satisfying to use.
3. Charge Mode feels awesome to use. You earn it through landing enough attacks while not getting hit too much. It's a super ability that rewards player skill, setting the tone for what will enable you victory in this game.
4. All aspects of combat are able to be mastered, meaning your fate is mostly controlled by your skill level.
The bad news:
1. Enemy variety gets boring to look at fairly quickly.
You won't really be visually astonished by any of the enemies you encounter. There is basic foot soldier, soldier with shield, flying robot, big robot, and c r a b (they don't look like crabs).
2. Hiryu can take a shitton of damage in a very short amount of time.
He has no invincibility frames at any point. Add this to the fact that Hiryu can be hitstunned means that he can take a massive amount damage in less than a second and there isn't a real way to stop this other than to move fast enough out of the way in the right direction. Hiryu also can get hitstunned while struck in mid-air, and will begin falling once he's hit. Certain attacks also make him lose his grip while climbing. All these factors combined lead to many moments in the game that feel outright cheap and undeserved. These moments can be mitigated after getting Option A, however, which provides a momentary projectile shield.
3. Bosses are either too weak or too cheap.
Many bosses can be defeated simply by spamming the melee attack and moving around a moderate amount. This only gets easier later on once you realize you can combo the eagle and panther upgrades together into your flurry of regular attacks. Bosses can be stopped and stunned if you inflict enough damage on them. This leads to the interesting effect of not knowing a boss had a certain attack until you happen to stop beating on them. The final boss is disappointingly weak to fight against, especially in his biblical angel final form.
4. Hiryu's first jump has a strange quirk.
When doing a single jump starting from forward moving momentum, he will jump forward normally, and you wouldn't suspect anything would be off about this jump until you try to turn backwards while in mid-air. When switching to backwards movement in Hiryu's first jump, he will turn backwards instantly and retain the same speed as he was moving forward. This sounds minute in description, but it can throw off your rhythm in combat as he'll move in a direction at a speed you did not expect. It's a not intuitive and can be hard to get used to. It's further strange that his first jump has this property considering neither his second jump nor his plasma catapult jump have this quirk.
5. Hiryu's climbing also has some odd quirks.
To start climbing on a surface you have to press the directional button matching the direction you have to grab it from (press up to grab ceiling, press left to grab wall on the left), but this is not always true. For example, if you are running in a straight direction to the left and reach a dropoff point, Hiryu will sometimes not drop off and start falling but instead will grab the wall that's perpendicular to the floor's dropoff. Hiryu can also freeze enemies, which effectively turns them into blocks you can use for climbing. Moving into a mid-air frozen enemy can cause you to grip onto them when you meant to attack them. This can happen a fair amount in late game, where there are many enemies in a small room that can be frozen.
6. Story is bad.
It's a cliche hero-comes-in-to-save-the-world-from-big-evil-Hitler-guy-and-hero-wins kind of story. A weak narrative can be mitigated by having the characters or character dynamics be compelling or interesting, but not even these are here. The lore isn't very interesting to read either.
7. Voice acting is bad and feels forced.
The dialogue for the English script is outright cringy once you hear the voice actors speak their lines. Hiryu has a bad Japanese accent, the Pooh sisters (yes, fuckin Pooh) sound really forced in their evil bitch monologues, the insane scientist goes laughably overboard in his "hehe I'm cwazy" speeches, General Mikiel and another side character have bad lazy Russian accents, the scientist Schlange (yes, fuckin Schlange) is the worst sounding of them all, and the final villain Grandmaster Meio is just... plain. You can tell these actors showed up for a paycheck and nothing else.
8. Exploration and unlockables are underwhelming.
The development team didn't really try much when it came to what is often the best part about games: exploration and being rewarded for said exploration. It can be fun to get new upgrades, but the same animation is used everytime you get one and it gets old. Upgrades and extras are placed in rather easily spotted and reachable areas. For extras, they simply recycled the concept art and character models that were created for the game, attached some lazily written lore to them and called it good enough. There are the Beacon Run and Survival challenge mode maps that can be unlocked too, but those don't provide much incentive in of themselves to play.
8. Achievements.
Achievements are a little odd. The achievement for beating General Mikiel tends to not unlock after beating him the first time on Hard mode. There is also an achievement for grabbing all large health canisters, but no achievement for finding all unlockable extras. No achievements exist for meeting any conditions in the Beacon Run and Survival mode challenges. On Xbox, the game can also bug out if you don't force quit it for a few hours and it'll somehow think you're not connected to Xbox Live, and therefore won't record any new achievements you should've gotten. Uncertain if this bug can happen beyond Xbox.
Fun Facts:
- The giant millipede bosses are actually several crabs attached together. The crabs did this willingly.

The crabs willingly attached their mouths to each others' anuses.



- The Brainwalker units are called so because they are controlled by actual brains. Human brains. Civilian brains.

They abducted civilians and put their brains into robots.



- The coolest sounds in the game (I personally believe) come from the mechanized dragon boss roars and the shield soldiers' voice line, "GO NO FURTHER!".