As we all know this is 1996 and every gaming magazine is raving about new shooter Quake—which one-ups the Doom engine with real time 3D rendering—but the new id Software shooter may have some serious competition from Pixel Titan’s Strafe, which seems to have pulled off all the technical tricks with a lot more blood.
Blood stains everything in Strafe, but it’s not just cosmetic. Like with Super Meat Boy, blood stays on the walls and floors, forming what Strafe level designer Billy Smith called a “bloody breadcrumb trail” through the level. Plus, you’ll need to splatter blood on the floor to combat acid pools, which can be made safe by drowning them in gore.
Quake may have a Trent Reznor soundtrack, but Strafe has the best video game commercial ever copied to VHS and tape-swapped at Fangoria conventions.
Strafe hopes to top Quake in other ways too, making 1996 an all-out FPS brawl to remember. Unlike Quake, levels in Strafe are procedurally generated. Every time you return to one of Strafe’s four different zones you’ll be up against a different map. Strafe also features insanely customizable weapons classes. You begin each level with either a shotgun, SMG or railgun, but modifiable primary and secondary firing modes add all sorts of insane configurations, including shrapnel-heavy shotgun configurations and sticky C4 launchers.
It’s going to be a tricky choice between Quake and Strafe, but battle lines have to be drawn. Only one of these gorey, shooter masterpieces deserve to survive to see 1997.
