devonrv

Today, I returned to the Strider franchise and beat the fourth game to bear the Strider name:

You could say I'm taking this series in stride.

As with its previous installments, this is a platformer. The plot seems to be a retread of the first game, but of course, we’re here for the game-play. Controls are similar to the first Strider game: you can jump, swing your cipher, slide, and climb walls and ceilings. However, this game add a few new mechanics: double-tapping forward will make you dash, pushing the jump button in the air will let you do a double jump, rapidly pushing the attack button and the directional buttons while in the air will make you do this spinny-attack (and keep you airborne for a bit longer), and pushing the circle button will make you go into boost mode, which lets you shoot homing plasma waves for a short time (going into boost mode cost one B icon). Plus, you have a bit of control over your jumps in this game (unlike the first game, where jumps have fixed movement).

This game also has more options than the first game. Rather than have a traditional “easy, normal, or hard” selection for difficulty, you have a meter of one to eight stars (one being low difficulty, eight being high difficulty) as well as a similar meter for determining how much health you start with. There’s also a toggle for the time limit (on or off) and for rapid fire (hold the button to swing the sword multiple times). I played with the default options (4 star difficulty, 5 star HP, time limit on, rapid fire off).

The game begins with a stage select: you can choose which of the first three stages to clear first. At the end of each level, your score is totaled up and you get a grade based on how well you did. Beating one level unlocks the fourth stage, and beating all four unlocks the final stage. Stages themselves are broken up into scenes, and each scene has its own time limit (and between each scene is a loading screen).Many scenes have a mini-boss at the end, and in typical Strider fashion, they usually go down in mere seconds. Actual stage bosses are much more formidable, though, and they have their own scenes. Honestly, the game might have been quite a bit harder than the first Strider if it weren’t for one significant change: rather than have checkpoints and a life system, this game lets you continue right from where you died, even keeping the amount of damage you’ve dealt to a boss (and just like the first game, you have unlimited continues). Plus, falling into a pit doesn’t instantly kill you; it just takes away 1 HP and puts you back on land. Also, getting hit doesn’t knock you back nearly as far as it did in the first game.

The first stage takes place in a city. You’ll be running over the tops of buildings and girders while fighting the game’s cannon fodder soldiers (the original ones make a return appearance, but there’s a new type that, to me, looks kinda like Klonoa). Whenever you kill an enemy, at least one blue disc will pop out, and you can collect these for points. Most of the mini-bosses in this level are reused from the first game: the martial-artist girls, the cyborg, even the snake-robot thing makes an appearance as the stage boss.

The second stage takes place in a medieval-style castle, but you still get to fight lots of robots. One scene begins with the protagonist slashing at a giant bulldozer-thing to show that it’s immune to your attacks, and you have to run away from it as it chases you across a bridge; at the end of the scene, you see it just kinda fall off the bridge (which I found to be pretty funny), and you fight a different robot as the scene’s mini-boss. Another scene has you fighting a jouster riding a robot horse, and one of his attacks involves charging at you. There are boxes on the left side of the arena, and you can either use them for evasion or break them to get items. The stage boss is just some guy flying around a ring-shaped arena (as you run forward, you can see the previous platforms coming back around in the background) while a robot hydra stands in the center and attacks you.

The third stage takes place in Antarctica and begins on an ice shelf (so if the game were remade today, this part would be an underwater level! Ha ha ha). A neat detail in this stage is that the cannon fodder soldiers wear ice skates and attack you with hockey sticks. One of the scenes has you climbing a wall, and as you do so, the scene’s mini-boss, a helicopter, will fly in and start shooting missiles at the wall. You can jump on the helicopter during this part of the level and start attacking it, so by the time it reaches the top and the fight “begins,” some of its health will already be gone. After beating the mini-boss, flames will start chasing you, but the flames are fast, and the only way to outrun the flames is if you start running as soon as the mini-boss is defeated. It’s kinda cheap, actually (one of the only negatives I can bring up about the game). A later part of the stage brings back the gravity flipping mechanic from the first game, and after that scene is a sphere boss. The sphere boss is an improvement over the first game’s circle boss (then again, pretty much anything is an improvement over the circle boss) since the sphere prefers to shoot lasers and rotate, and if it does catch you in its gravitational orbit, you won’t get hurt when it releases you. However, the sphere boss isn’t without its own annoyances: when it shoots its lasers and rotates, it’s faster than your walk speed but slower than your run speed, so you have to run and stop, but if you stop on the left or right side of the ring-shaped arena, you have to push up or down to walk/run.

The fourth level begins with a scene in the air and you have to jump across little planes (similar to the end of the third level of the first game). After this, you’re climbing on the main flying battleship, and you infiltrate it before the next scene. One of the bosses is the ship’s power core, and defeating that leads to a scene where you have to escape the ship as it’s exploding.

The last level takes place in a space station, and the first scene has very low gravity (one jump sends you up by, like, three screens). As you advance in the stage, you’ll come across a scene where the gravity flips every few seconds and you get kinda swarmed by enemies. Afterward, you have to fight the sphere boss again (this is the only boss you have to fight more than once in this game, and of course, it had to be the worst one). The robot-snake boss also makes a second appearance, but you don’t fight it; instead, it serves as an arena where you fight another Strider, one who betrayed the team. This fight is pretty easy since, if you knock the Strider off the snake robot, you can just keep knocking him back as he tries to jump back on. After this, you fight the final boss of the first game, but rather than dash around the arena, he teleports around it (and you can kinda tell where in the arena he ends up since the teleport sound will play in one speaker if he’s to the left or right of where you are). Beating him will take you to the final boss: a pair of colorful pincers. The tip of the claws will shoot fireballs at you, the vertices of the claws will shoot lightning at you, and where the claws connect is what you need to attack to damage the boss. As you might have guessed, the fireball and lightning spawners can be attacked to be stunned temporarily, and beating this boss will trigger the ending cut-scene and the credits.

After you beat the game, you unlock a new playable character. Rather than slash with a sword, this one has three ranged projectiles that act as homing boomerangs: they fly at whatever enemy is near, and they come back to you after a bit. You can’t attack enemies while all the projectiles are away, but the projectiles are so powerful that it’s basically like playing the game on easy mode (well, easier mode). Beat the game as him and you unlock “infinite boost” in the options. I read that the game has a “stage 0,” but apparently, I have to beat the PS1 version of Strider 1 to unlock it, and I would rather play new games than replay old ones.

Overall, this is a well made game, and it even improves on its predecessor. My only complaint is that it’s short: it took 40 minutes to beat the game as the main protagonist and 21 minutes to beat it as the unlockable character. With that said, if you’re a fan of platformers, I recommend you check out this game (just be aware that it’s short, so don’t pay too much for it).

bubblevixen83

Congrats on such a detailed insight into this game and congrats on completing it! :D

Arbiter Libera

Very late to the party but yeah, this was the my first foray into Strider all the way back. Glad to see I really wasn’t wrong and game is extraordinarily short, though.