STRIDER™ / ストライダー飛竜®
Strider stands as a reboot to an old Arcade series by the same name. The game stars Hiryu, the last remaining Strider to be sent on a suicide mission that involves taking down Grandmaster Meio, the iron fisted ruler of Kazakh City and the Earth and avenging the fallen Striders.
The game’s mechanics are pretty simple, like an old school title should. It’s structured very similarly to some older games like Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Super Metroid and the such as it has a lot of backtracking as well as you gain new powers to unlock new doors and the such - which may lead to new powers, health upgrades, energy upgrades, kunai upgrades, etc. There’s lots to find in the game.
– Real player with 18.3 hrs in game
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As a Strider fan, this game was a disappointment.
Compared to other “metroidvania” games, this game is a disappointment.
New and improved review with impressions I wrote up when asked for specifics about why I disliked the game so much.
For the record, I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 9-10 hours with Strider. It was just enough to get 100% and then delete it from my hard drive immediately.
I can honestly say I will NEVER play that game again. EVER. And here’s a list of reasons why:
(1) There is no variety, in anything. There’s two main types of levels – futuristic cityscape and sewer. Maybe you could count the temple area… maybe… but it reminds me a lot of a blend between the sewer and the city. This makes it feel like you’re never going anywhere.
– Real player with 15.3 hrs in game
Smart Gecko
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
– Real player with 4.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best 2.5D Logic Games.
(This game was received for curation with no promise of a review, positive or otherwise.)
Smart Gecko is essentially a simple variant of the “don’t cross your own path” puzzle sub-genre. It could have been a passable way to spend a little time, but for the fact that zero effort has been made to fix some pretty glaring issues.
It should have been simple: Move your gecko one space at a time in order to eat all the fireflies and finish the board. Yet there are multiple problems, least of all the lack of a tutorial. It seems like that would be unnecessary, but at least two of your losses will be figuring out that turning into a wall makes your gecko explode violently, as does walking into a pillar (in the game’s overhead view, the pillar looks like something you can walk over). There is no way to undo a bad move, which will happen more than you’d like due to the inexplicable lag after pressing a movement key. There is a timer that doesn’t seem to do anything, and no option to play without it. Finishing a level means you have to actually maneuver your gecko to the edge of the screen, and then press another key to move it off the screen. The problem with this (besides the obvious redundancy) is that you cannot tell where the actual correct path is. And since, as I’ve mentioned, there is no undo key, you’ll just have to start over.
– Real player with 0.5 hrs in game