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. 

then you wont see a good return in quality.

I thought Strafe would have turned out better. Clearly there are lot of issues.

I really hope Gibhard turns out well, it's doing some of the same things with level generation but hopefully it has better algorithms and AI (other stuff like lighting already looks better than Strafe).

Dusk should, in theory, be the best of all the bunch since it will have properly authored levels. 

Weird, didn't they get 180k from kickstarter? I'm pretty sure the team was like 2-4 people before devolver got involved. 

is on final sale at 90% off most places because of it being made "no longer available for sale" due to music licensing issues.

It doesn't really sound as if it's a game I'd like, but for $3 I may go ahead and grab a copy from GOG. 

Alan? Rick man, thanks. 

If not for the fact that Die Hard is one of my favorite movies, that might have slipped right past me. 

Can anybody answer this question?

If a game download code bought from Amazon, Newegg, etc. (anywhere but Steam) states:

"Steam account required for game activation and installation."

After the game is installed and activated, can it be played without Steam either running or even installed on the computer?

If anyone has personal experience of this I'd like to know. Otherwise I'll probably just have to perform a $60 experiment. 

If you need Steam to activate/install then Steam must be running to play it. You can use Steam in offline mode at the very least.

If you try to run the game's exe straight from the directory, it will just launch Steam. 

However, some games only use Steam merely as a platform for buying and downloading, but can be run and played without the Steam client. Witcher 3, for instance. 

That's why I am wondering. It is an AAA title, but the game would not be bought through Steam.

The sentence I quoted is exactly what is stated everywhere I've seen the game being sold, and it does not say that Steam is needed to play the game. Of course, it's not like game companies have never lied before.

It's really too new to buy now anyway, as it's still selling for full price and it's not worth that much really. There is apparently a cracked version though. Maybe when the price drops to something reasonable, I'll buy it and just play that. 

In my experience, if you buy or unlock a code via Steam it will need to be running when you launch the game. Have not done this in a while but every Amazon Digital game I have purchased works this way. This may have changed but I doubt it. 

AAA steam games all have no-steam cracks, if it's steam your worried about. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwNyVE1r3qU

Fuck OFF. 

I watched 3 seconds and then puked on esc.
In case of any spam markers, I'm refering to #9983 

I f quake was just absolutely the biggest piece of shit and it wasnt like quake