94. Strafe (Pixel Titans, Playstation 4, 2017)

Strafe is a roguelike first person shooter with blocky, low poly graphics. You play as a scrapper, sent to a derelict space ship to loot it for materials, but once you arrive, you find that the ship has been infested by hostile zombie-like aliens. It's all very mid-90s FPS vibe that the game is going for, and it pulls it off decently well. The music is more 80s, but I prefer a bumping synth soundtrack to metal most of the time.

The first thing I noticed when the game started was that the look sensitivity on the right joystick was way too high. Opening up the menu, it was turned to maximum by default, making me wonder if the developers found this to be the optimal way to play. I had to turn it way down to make the game playable, but once I found a comfortable level, I was able to have a really good time with Strafe.

Gameplay is fast, as you would expect from something inspired by Doom & Quake, and there's a decent amount of enemy variety, at least in early levels. It doesn't quite have the nice snappiness of Doom, though there are also a lot more features: upgradeable weapons, 2 in-game currencies, shops, even jumping. Levels are randomly generated, but thankfully they are relatively small, and the game gives you a map as well.

At the start of the game, you can choose between a shotgun, machine gun, or rail gun, and each were fun to use in their own way (the railgun has a slow but powerful secondary fire that was very interesting), I definitely had the most success with the shotgun. You can pick up other guns from around the levels as well, but ammo is generally scarce. This is definitely not a roguelike that I love enough to complete, though I can definitely see myself playing enough to get through the first area, at least.

4/5, Now I just wish there was an actual Doom roguelike