Strider review

[Administrator]

Strider Hiryu sprints deeply, at forty-five degrees, arm raised to mouth as if shielding his lips while leaning into a mean wind. His crimson scarf billows dramatically behind. He launches into a cartwheel arc through the air before landing with a silent thud on the tail of a familiar foe, the grandson of the chain-link Chinese dragon that loop-de-looped through the air in the original Strider of the arcade. This remake may have been developed in California by Double Helix, but it bears a strong family likeness: Strider's silhouette is unmistakably that first conceived by Tatsumi Wada in 1989, and the lithe ninja's gait and armory remain intact. You even benefit from the generous double jump he learned in the second game.
But this time these skills are not freely given: they must instead be won. The gnarly designs of the first two games, pushed into unforgiving shapes by the economics of the arcade (where every death meant another paycheque for publisher Capcom) are gone. Today's descendant takes a new, unexpected and yet also comfortable form: that of the Metroidvania, a vast city broken into a thousand rooms and hallways, which can investigated as your character's growing set of abilities opens up the previously inaccessible world around him.
In one room, you learn how to momentarily dart through time and space, teleporting a few feet ahead, an ability that allows you to pass into some hitherto locked areas. Another boss fight rewards you with kunai: throwing knives which can be used to spike enemies or flick otherwise unreachable door switches. In this way the game world unfurls and you tread deeper within.
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