Judging by the copious negative reviews, people who were excited by the marketing feel mislead by the actual gameplay. $20 is no big deal and I was excited to play this but now I am going to watch a few "let's plays" before buying. 

Firstly, congrats to the devs for shipping a first game. Seeing others without prior experience simply finishing a game is inspiring.

That said, I would have to agree with the negative reviews. Personally, I expected strafe to be what it is and I think others did too. I hope the team is able to turn the negative feedback into positive changes. We shall see! 

I feel bad because I would have liked for this game to be good.
I'm still holding out for Gibhard to be good since it seems to have got a lot of the gameplay elements correct. I also feel like Dusk will probably be a better game too.

Most of the issues with Strafe could be patched out tbh. 

Being that the guy behind Strafe even remembers the original game, he must be around our ages 30's and 40's. He must have been an avid gamer in the 90s so he'd have been gaming for a good 20 years at least. He must like his twitch shooters from that era. So I'm reading over these steam reviews and it sounds like the game completely misses the mark everywhere. Even looking at it, all I see is flying colours of jizz all over the screen. Roguelike design. Chokepoint combat. Low ammo, almost no health and enemies that rush you the minute the second starts. Looks like the best thing about is the box cover art.

It just amazes me that he and many indie developers fuck this most basic shit up, when trying to recreate 90s styled action games. 

I'm not surprised by those reviews. The game's marketing was awesome, but that's because the project author has a degree in marketing/video editing (something along those lines; it's in his resume, which I saw long ago).

The public made a mistake in believing that great moviemaking skills would translate into great game development skills. The public always make this mistake, which is why honest trailers can't compete. Developers are almost obligated to bullshit their audience nowadays, which is kinda depressing. 

from their latest kickstarter email:

"We started receiving comments on youtube and twitter accusing us of shilling the game and antagonizing people on websites and forums we don�t use. Some people are impersonating us and trolling around with the intent to generally just make us look bad it seems. This has happened before around the time we released the beta and thought it was a one time thing but we learned yesterday that it never stopped. Only trust our official updates here on kickstarter, steam forums, twitter and official news outlets.

For a few hours we got hit with a surge of negative reviews before they died down they all got recommended to the top and are now the only reviews visible on our front page even though we currently have more positive ratings than negative by a third"

I agree the game has serious issues that will hopefully be addressed by the devs, but unfortunately the internet is full of cunts that do stupid shit like this to people trying to make fun games :/ 

The influence of current gen trends is very strong. People expect randomisation to extend longevity, they also expect being able to upgrade shit, shops etc...

I think it hurts a game such as this that were very much known for exceptional and fiendish level design. 

The positive reviews doesn't sound much better either.

The negative reviews I've seen doesn't sound like they're from internet trolls. If the negative reviews are getting more upvotes, that may well be because the negative opinions about the game are stronger, despite being in the minority - certainly stronger than positive reviews that ends with "Is it worth $19.96? Honestly, no."

In the few times I've tried developing indie games, sometimes I've noticed that people were going too easy on me. People like to root for the underdog, and they get afraid of giving negative opinions because indie developers aren't perceived as faceless corporations, but as regular people.

People take everything too personally, and they also expect others to take everything too personally. I've had to actively search for opinions on websites that I never visited before to find raw, unfiltered negative opinions about the projects I was developing. And most of them made sense, despite of how harsh they were.

Doom 4 also got a ton of negative reviews early on, because of its multiplayer. Afterwards, the public realized that its true strength is in singleplayer; the multiplayer audience went to play other games, and the singleplayer audience got stronger. This is normal.

Every product at launch sells mostly because of expectations, and expectations are usually inaccurate. Also, it's hard to blame the public for their inaccurate expectations when Strafe advertises itself as a 1996 FPS, even going as far as using the strafe1996.com URL for their website. 

Yooo so steam says I have 28 hours played so here we go :

Absolutely buy this game, but wait until the first large official patch comes out. It fixes some nasty bugs that can cause save corruption.

I'm not gonna go into detail, but I feel very confident in saying that this is an excellent spiritual sequel to System Shock 2 that does so many things right that its easy to forgive a few shortcomings.

The game really is a single giant level (the space station) and gives you a ton of freedom in how you explore it. It's amazing how the layout starts to coalesce in your mind after a time, and all the proportions fit. I can already see me playing a 2nd time through with totally different skills just to see what areas I can get to in a different order etc. Great stuff.

Small things like the fact that every human on the station is a real person who has (or had) a function on the crew. You can track any individual from a security console and go find them (alive or dead). This doesn't sound like a big deal but as you go through the game you are reading all these emails and audiologs etc and you start to piece together this giant jigaw puzzle of what everyone on the station was doing before the game started. It all starts to fit together and you can then form a better opinion of both yourself and others and act accordingly.

The GLOO gun is cool as shit. In fact, most of the guns are good.

Err yeah, this actually got long. Game is good. Definitely buy it. Wait for patch. Bye. 

GOG is giving away Eador: Genesis, a turn-based fantasy strategy game, for free. As of this writing the offer is good for 29 hours.

https://www.gog.com/game/eador_genesis 

Good post. Does the boxy clean art deco space station style actually get remotely appealing at any point? 

The Deco stuff is used mostly for the flashy parts of the station ie the main lobby, the arboretum, crew quarters etc. There are a lot of parts that are more basic sci-fi and feel kinda like the international Space Station on steroids.

I mean, the deco style is still there in these sections, but it is much more subdued. For example here is the shuttle bay (no spoilers) http://imgur.com/deiu8bL 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ifaFCh38qw 

Found myself nodding quite a lot during that 

Found myself nodding off quite a lot during that.

Looks eye-wateringly dull. 

I doubt I'd play it even if it was free. It just doesn't look like a game I'd find enjoyable.

Almost always if "roguelike" or "procedurally generated" appears in a game description, I immediately move on. 

"retro" FPS devs should give this a gander 

From that video, Strafe's visual effects and aesthetics are good. There's plenty of little touches, and the UI and the HUD are nice.

However, enemy design is poor (including their aesthetics), combat encounter design is poor, sound fx design is poor, and the levels are too blocky. The enemies reminds me of the ones in Sauerbraten, with their poor rithm and floaty movement.

The Wolfenstein 3D engine only allowed square angles. Doom's maps were explicitly designed to use lots of non-square angles, to showcase Doom's superior technology. Strafe tries to give the impression of being inspired by Doom, but its level design has much more in common with Wolfenstein 3D, using square angles everywhere.

Also, Strafe's lighting is too uniform. This may be a limitation of the random generation of levels. It's disappointing to see people comparing Strafe to Quake (which is an actual 1996 game), when Quake's lighting is all about moody settings with strongly varied lighting that gives its levels a very deep atmosphere.

My list to improve Strafe would be:
- Complete replacement of enemies, using new ones designed & coded from scratch.
- More sound effects, to give better feedback.
- Handcrafted levels 

A couple of years ago when I was looking for a new project to work on, I talked to Strafe's lead but passed because the amount of money he offered was extremely low. It was a salary that might be acceptable if you lived with your parents rent free, but way too low for a Grown Ass Man(�) with bills to pay.

I wonder if he had a hard time finding anyone because of that and just decided to do it procedurally. 

Pretty sure it was procedural from the get-go. The thing with the Icarus levels though is that they're obviously the first to have been created, have been left as is and are by far the worst levels in the game. The rest of the levels are slightly better but not by much at all. Ironic for a supposedly old-school shooter to fail the Romero rule of designing your first levels last. 

Unless they completely redesign the game from the ground up. Not gonna happen. 

It must have been really low as I said I'd do it for �16k. 

Lower than that by a pretty good margin.

Anyway, lesson to scrappy indie devs trying to make a shooter: unless you're well versed and accomplished in the ways of level design (see: Gibhard) don't assume procedural generation is going to solve all your problems.

It's as if level design is actually an important position that you should hire people with experience (even if it's mod experience) to do... 

No offence to the devs but that's good. We can forget about it and move swiftly on, with a footnote that making your OMG SO PSEUDO-RETRO FAST PACED OMGZOR fps into a pile of arse is a good warning note for others not to do it. 

I think it's fun despite its flaws.