Strider Reviews
Strider is a liberating, free-form action platformer studded with frustrating callbacks to an arcade era better left behind.
Strider is an unbalanced yet extremely stylish platformer, and the series' best game since the original.
It has its flaws, but they are easy to overlook because the game is just plain, unadulterated fun. In fact, the only thing that would make the game more enjoyable is playing in an actual arcade setting.
Had this game been released a decade or two ago, it might have been seen as a classic of its type, alongside Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night. But today, at the tail end of a wave of Metroidvania-style games, Strider fails to stand out. It's a competent, workable game that draws inspiration from the right places, but which is rarely anything more than a cover version of the greats.
A slick pastiche of '80s retro cool and modern gameplay, Strider is both faithful to its source material and still capable of finding its own identity. It's basically the raddest Saturday-morning cartoon you'll ever play.
Outside of a few minor annoyances, this is exactly what I was hoping for out of a Strider reboot
Strider takes the best parts of its lineage to heart
Strider is a high-speed, acrobatic action game with a hero that's fun to control from the first blade swipe to the final deathblow.
This retelling of the original Strider arcade game has a lot of cool moments, but a lack of meaningful challenges holds it back.
It has been over a decade since the masked hero has graced his own game, but Strider is back and better than ever. Double Helix has done a phenomenal job in bringing the futuristic ninja into the modern day by not only upgrading the visuals while maintaining the two-dimension plane, but adding an addictive and well-constructed progression structure to keep the campaign interesting.
Strider's not really the kind of game the cognoscenti get excited about. It won't be winning any awards or the subject of a load of thinkpieces, and that's because it's nothing more than a simple design executed near-flawlessly. It's limited in the same sense that a cat is limited by not being a dog. Strider is a great game and it gets me totally pumped; it looks incredible, sounds amazing, and is tonnes of fun. If I ruled the world this would be on billboards, and they would say very simply: STRIDER'S BACK.
I didn't feel like I was experiencing a madman's vision when playing the 2014 Strider. It was more like a tempered salute. Yeah, I ran into the aforementioned mecha gorilla again. That was OK. And the final boss was kind of cooky, I guess.
Strider doesn't do anything exceptionally well, but we get so few good Metroid-Vania style games these days that it's still definitely worth a play. On higher difficulties it will require skill, but otherwise Strider is a brainless exercise in platforming, exploration, and (button mashing) ninja combat.
Strider is easily one of the best games that I've played this year. This is a title that reminds me of why I got into video games in the first place: for the pure joy of PLAYING. Strider is a fantastic game that I will keep playing and replaying for some time.
Strider is an enjoyable game but it's not one that particularly stands out against others of its type. It is cleverly designed, as this style of game must be, but not so much that it earns the right to sit alongside the genre's ageing greats like Symphony of the Night and it's not quite up to the complex replayability of modern classics like Shadow Complex. It's a decent game that generally looks very nice and will while away a few hours, but you won't be rushing to tell your friends about it and you might not want to return after completing it.
Double Helix has really come into its own. Strider reminds me of a Shadow Complex with a much better combat system and a scaled-down exploration element. And that's perfectly okay with me.
Double Helix turns in the best playing Strider ever made, but its game lacks the vital visual panache of its predecessors.
Remarkably, Double Helix has managed to nail down the classic feel of what Strider Hiryu is all about: athleticism, agility, and destroying everything in his path. At the same time, the game modernizes the design into something unique, even if it borrows heavily from the Metroidvania genre. Strider may have been gone for over a decade, but his return is more than welcome.
For its price, Strider has great value, especially if you can switch gears towards being more exploratory at the end. Otherwise, it's frustrating as heck to have the difficulty curve go from playing tag with some school chums, to enemies darting for your throat with the gnashing of werewolf-like fangs for your body's fleshy sustenance. Ninjas are lean meat, after all.
The mixture of old school, new school, and Metroidvania works surprisingly well – even if Strider's long-awaited reboot still feels slightly too safe.