Game review: Strider for Xbox 360

Way back in the days when I was a scrawny wee nerd, I couldn’t afford to have more than one console. I had my NES, and the only way I could play Genesis games was to go to the video store and rent one of their consoles. Strider was my favorite Genesis game, while the NES version was…well, it was shit. You’d think this would have been a red flag for me when so many reviews said the new Strider reboot was a lot like the old NES game, but no, I had on some nostalgia glasses, and I was all “Oooh, a platforming game like the good old days.”

Except this is not like the good old days. This is gaming at the absolute cheapest and shittiest level of padding tactics. Back when cartridges had limited memory, programmers had to pad the length of a game to make it seem like a good value for your gaming dollars because longer = better no matter how you accomplish that feat. So some assholes decided to make the player keep running through the same maps facing the same respawning enemies and bosses, all so they could say their game had X hours of play time. That at least 75% of that time was spent NOT HAVING FUN was irrelevant. So having a choice to remake the awesome Genesis title or the shit Nintendo title, why for the love of baby Jesus did they fucking opt to imitate the shit game?

Part of me wants to be nice and talk about a direct comparison to the NES title in terms of the graphics. I mean, really, if my 10-year-old self had been handed a game to play on any console that looked this pretty, I’d have shit a double-thick chocolate milkshake and creamed my jeans at the same time. But that same 10-year-old me would soon be screaming in outrage trying to play this shit sandwich, and not even nostalgia can take away the reminder that I hated a lot of games for everything the programmers made me suffer through.

Let’s start with the controls. The D-Pad –what you’re supposed to use for movement in a platformer– is of course used for weapon swapping. As is standard for so many modern games, movement and attack direction is “controlled” by the left stick. I put that in quotes because one fucking time out of twenty, I might get the controller to attack or move in the way I actually wanted. The rest of the time, it was a fucking disaster of bad jumps, attacks that went to one side or the other around the target I was aiming for, and falling off of platforms because the game interpreted a press to the left as “drop off the side and into the bottomless pit” instead of “cling to the side of the platform.”

When the game starts you off, you’ve only got the sword and no ranged attacks, and you will play a lot of the early game with the enemies punking you out with no way to hit them unless you run up and take 20-30 lasers in the face. The upgrades to the sword never make it much more useful than the default, and if you want proof, just backtrack to the first levels after collecting all possible sword upgrades. It’s still a pathetic weapon no matter what color of “plasma” you add to it.

The same is true of all your ninja powers. I thought the “cypher reflect” was neat in a jedi kind of way, and in theory, being able to send lasers back at the enemies sounded like an equalizer for all those ranged weapon enemies. But NO, I can spend a minute getting shot by five different enemies, never once getting a laser to reflect, and when I finally do, it angles up at the ceiling. It’s easier just to get shot in the face to wade through the laser fire and hack the enemies apart with my pathetic sword.

The kunai may also be upgraded to explode, but they’re useless against enemies with a shield. One of your abilities is a dash that gets upgrades of its own to do “damage” to the enemies. But again, it doesn’t work on enemies with shields, and even the enemies it does work on, you have to dash through them several times. It’s still easier to just take lasers in the face and hack everything with your sword. This is the extent of strategy and progression in the game. You just keep hacking shit until you reach the end.

The same is true of the three “options” you pick up. These are methods of travel that also double as weapons, but not a one of them is worth a damn. Option B says it’s best for airborne enemies, a statement that makes zero sense because invoking the flaming eagle sends it in a downward sweeping arc under Hiryu, and never comes close to touching any airborne enemies. Option C is a shield that doesn’t block half the missile attacks thrown by enemies, and doesn’t last more than three seconds even when it is working. Option A is a “Tetrapodal Panther droid” who runs back and forth across the screen, generally being ignored by most enemies. I have to wonder why I made all the effort to collect these items, when they’re all useless. Oh wait, right, they’re also all used as “keys” to access different fast travel systems, or to operate certain machines to open new pathways. Aside from that, they rarely serve a purpose as weapons.

The real problem I come back to again and again is, even with all the upgrades, the game remains hard because I spend so much time wrestling with the controls. If an enemy is directly overhead and all I have to do is fire some kunai straight up, I can be assured that I will use up most of my attack energy firing kunai to the right and left 30 times before finally getting one shot to go up as I intended. This is where I’d love to use a normal D-pad to just aim up. Failing that, I’d like to use the right stick to bring up an aiming recticle so I have half a fucking clue of where my ranged weapons will go when they’re fired. But no, the right stick “controls the camera.” Which is to say it nudges the screen in one direction by roughly half an inch. Why is it even used at all? It’s fucking useless and NEVER serves a purpose.

Worse, the Xbox 360 D-pad can’t handle a simple direction input either. See, you use the D-pad to choose which “plasma” the sword channels, (plasma being used in the video game sense, and having no relation to plasma of any kind in the real world) and certain enemies have shields that can only be broken with the corresponding plasma type. But without fail, whenever I needed to switch to say, fire plasma, I’d get ice or the default blade every single time. I had to fight to choose the right blade type, and the whole time I was screaming “NO, PICK THE FUCKING FIRE SWORD,” I was being shot by the enemies hiding behind the dick with the shield. Why? Because in old school video games, there is no such thing as friendly fire.

So I had to fight to get the right sword selected every time. I had to fight to get the ranged weapons to hit their target every time. When I got the dash move, I had to fight to get it to point the right way. EVERY. SINGLE. FUCKING. TIME. And all of this is made even more aggravating when I need something done in a split second or I’ll die, and of course I die, and die again. And again…and again. I’m not dying because this one double jump is so tricky. I’m dying because I can’t get the fucking analog stick to work right.

This is before we even get to the bosses, not a one of whom isn’t full of cheap tactics. Almost everyone can teleport around to dodge my wimpy sword, and they all have ranged attacks. One boss, Solo, spends the entire fight hovering high enough so that you have to double jump just to reach him for a single sword swipe. His gun fires energy blasts that cover the entire platform and can only be dodged by dropping and hanging on the side of the platform. (Yeah, and good fucking luck getting Hiryu to actually hang on instead of dropping to his death or climbing back up to take the laser in the face.) He repeats the same obnoxious phrases throughout the fight, and I shut off the voices for the rest of the game because of him. And what do I get to challenge this asshole? At least a pea shooter? NO. I won’t actually get the pea shooter until three bosses later. LOVERLY. And, like all the bosses in this shit show, you have to face this asshole twice.

Here’s the thing I don’t get. This is 2014. You know all these cheap tactics were used in old games to make them harder and NOT FUN just so game makers could pack a few more levels into a game and justify raising the price. This is called padding, and most gamers hate that shit. So why for the love of God are these same lousy practices now considered a good thing by some gamers? How is doing a shitty job considered “old school?”

Do you like screaming at your controller or throwing it across the room? Do you like repeating the same monotonous bullshit over and over with little sense of progression? You do? Well fuck you, I don’t. Of all the great things that could have been brought back from old games, level padding, repeated boss fights, and shit controls were nowhere on my fucking wishlist. It’s like saying, “Gee, I wish someone could beat me up and steal my lunch money like the good old days.” Some shit just needs to stay buried in the past where it belongs.

Anywho, after gathering all the health and energy upgrades and getting all the sword and kunai upgrades, I headed off to the final battle in a tower where I have to fight my way through four sections just to activate an elevator. Sure, in the real world, we just call an elevator by pressing a button next to the lift. But in video game land, every employee must spend half an hour platforming just to take the elevator up to their assigned post. But anyway, once the elevator starts, the game throws out a gauntlet of every mini-boss you’ve faced before, plus drones punking you to ensure that you WILL lose health no matter how well you fight the bosses. There’s no use killing the drones first because they’ll respawn infinitely until you deal with the mini-bosses. The latter enemies use so many cheap tactics that I had to shut off the game and walk away or risk throwing my controller through the fucking TV.

I came back the next day, thinking I’d be put back on the elevator. NOPE. I have to enter the tower again and go through the whole bullshit process to get to the gauntlet. Then I can spend more time hating the people who thought this shit was fun. But at last, I get to the final boss, and he’s of course full of cheap tactics that make me do something like a cross between growling and yodeling for an hour.

After you beat him, you have to face him a second time in his “true form,” OF COURSE. And after you beat him again, you might expect some sort of cut-scene detailing Hiryu’s victorious walk into the sunset. BUT NO, FUCK YOU, you only get the end credits. So the game makers really went all out to emulate the WORST parts of the NES games. Shitty controls, repetitive enemy designs, repeatedly facing the same bosses and going through the same monotonous levels, and not even so much as a “Conglaturations you are winnar” for beating this piece of shit.

AND I WAS PLAYING ON EASY MODE. That’s right, all this bullshit could have been made cheaper and harder, just in case I wasn’t quite infuriated enough.

And here’s the thing about hard games that are made harder with cheap tactics and bad controls: they’re rarely fun. Some masochistic gamers out there operate under the delusion that there’s a sense of accomplishment that comes from finally beating a tough boss or section of a cheap game. Oh sure, if they record themselves playing, they spend just as much time as me screaming “Fuck you!” But they insist that all that growling and cussing is “really fun.” They like paying someone to torture their hands, and apparently rage is “fun” for them.

But I don’t agree, and I never feel elated upon completing these challenges. I have sore hands from thrashing around on the controller, and a strong urge to hunt down every last one of the programmers and strangle them with their own disemboweled intestines. I hate them so bad, I want them to choke out on their own shit.

*Takes deep breath* Like I said near the top of this rant, I want to give this game the benefit of the doubt because it’s real pretty. But even after collecting all the weapons to overcome the lower-level enemies’ cheap tactics, I never stopped hating the act of fighting the controls for even the most basic maneuvers. I never stopped hating having to be trapped in a room with a boss for the second or even third time. This game was a reminder of what I despised about a lot of old NES games, where the challenge wasn’t in finding the precise timing to jump around a level (like in the Mario Bros. games) or the exact movement pattern needed to slip through a boss’s defenses. (like Bionic Commando) No, the challenge was in getting lucky and having the character move anywhere near the direction I was pushing on my controller.

And I haven’t mentioned the story, but these bad guys are extremely nonchalant about Hiryu fucking their base up. Everyone is all “Oh, he killed half the base already? Big whoop, it’s not like we need to worry about him.” No one so much as bats an eyelash at my path of destruction, even after I destroyed their giant floating base. Even the final boss is like “You killed all my people. Good job for weeding out the incompetents for me.” I understand having confidence, but thinking you’re a god who’s gonna take over the world when your entire army can’t even kill one guy is more like delusion rather than bravado.

Let me give a random example: there’s three martial artist sisters you fight, (the tragically named Pooh triplets) and on the third fight, the first sister is like “Okay, you beat me twice, but this time, for sure, I’m going to kick your ass.” How? By using the exact same moves I’ve already beaten? And if I’m hacking everyone with this here plasma sword, why doesn’t it seem to kill anyone EVER? Shouldn’t a flaming sword be at least marginally effective at giving enemies an incurable case of dead?

I like games, y’all. I game on my PC, my Xbox, my Vita, and even my phone. I like hard games that are fair about their challenges. I love playing Super Stardust Delta, Spelunky, and Project Diva f even though I lose a lot. The main difference is, I never feel like I’m fighting the controls in those games. Strider, however, rarely lets me get to any platform without making multiple failed attempts at it. It’s not hard because of a legitimate challenge. It’s hard because the game is cheap and the controls suck a dick.

So I’m giving Strider two stars, and I would only recommend it to masochists who think paying to be abused and get angry is “fun.” If this is your idea of fun, have at it. As for me, I’m deleting this crap from my Xbox, and I hope I can erase the game as a traumatic memory soon.