‘STRIDE: Fates’ Review – The Parkour Campaign We’ve Been Waiting For

STRIDE (2021) offers the kind of parkour action you’d expect from a native VR version of Mirror’s Edge (2008), full of jumping through dangerous urban canyons, wall running, and shooting your way through hordes of creatures walking across the roof. While it was planned to arrive as DLC for the original game, developer Joy Way has now released the campaign as a standalone title, bringing the same high-flying creativity as the original and a usable story to go along with it. Read more to find out if it was worth the wait.

STRIDE: Conclusions Details:

Available By: Quest, SteamVR (coming 2024)
Release date: November 9, 2023
Amount: $30
Developer: The Way to Happiness
Updated on: Question 3

Game play

He’s a runner—a type of future soldier plucked from the slums of Iron City to serve in the SkyChasers police force. Using your superhuman abilities to fight against a number of gangs, you travel through the world killing everyone in your path for whatever reason the game throws at you next.

You’ll use a rifle, SMG, shotgun, knife, and sometimes a futuristic katana to take down baddies in the most stylish way imaginable. Here I’m blasting through the air from an aerial platform, activating slow-mo, hooking up a hovering drone, and swooping around like Spider-Man—par for the course Go away.

Because it offers physics-based interaction in the vein of Blade & Sorcery (2018)both games place a burden on the player they are consciously chosen making cool, timed kills of slow-moving characters so you can run into more John Wick-style goons.

Here it is Conclusions they vary, as you’ll be thrown into battles in one area that can be as straight forward or as cinematic as you can handle. When it all comes together, it’s one of the most satisfying combat modes you can experience in VR.

If you loved the high-flying, free-to-play action of the originalConclusions Over six hours of hands-on, well-thought-out, objective-based levels provide ample opportunity to flex your shooting, jumping, and running skills—the latter of which is done by literally pumping your arms to move you faster at the snail’s pace provided by the left joystick. You can also activate the same mode from Stride Arcade, which allows you to jump by raising your arms instead of hitting ‘A’.

To be fair, the game’s AI is pretty basic, and the bad guys act like ragdoll beat-em-up dummies—another reason I mentioned. Blade & Sorcery. Enemies are like moving targets that are less dangerous than enemies as such, and they are all the same. Even on the highest difficulty, it’s more about how you finesse your way from point A to B than really challenging enemies. There are a few boss level enemies with special abilities, but I would have liked a little more variety throughout.

While you’ll definitely need to shoot your way out of situations, there’s a confusing light as well. The puzzles feel a bit understated Half-Life: Alyx (2020), offers several basic styles that open doors, including a carnival-style game that tasks you with guiding a ball through a pipe full of obstacles. They’re all simple, but it’s fun to see that they not only serve to service your way forward in the game, but also unlock secret areas that may only have real collectibles in the game: the most colorful packs you can find. later spend at the end of the mission to unlock the weapons upgrade.

Collecting these packs is what drives you to steal the entire level, presenting you with three types of packs ranging from normal to rare. Weapon upgrades are minimal, though very practical and straight forward, such as an extended mag, red dot sight, or a higher level. I was hoping for more here as it’s a big part of the game, although it’s serviceable.

While most of the puzzles are almost like mini AR games played in front of a locked door or loot box, one of my favorite puzzles is when you’re told to connect to Cyber ​​Space, which is sort of what an obstacle course sounds like. it would be at home in old movies like Hackers (1995), TRON (1982) or The Lawnmower (1992). It’s a nice “safe” place to polish your skills, almost as if to remind you that you shouldn’t always take the safest route when you return to earth.

It took me a few hours to really get excited Step: Conclusions, since the first hour is when you’ll not only learn all the new skills you’ll need, but also make money against the seemingly baked-in kind of junk.

Climbing feels like a mental exercise every time, which leaves me wishing it was The Climb 2 (2021) in strength. Catching a ledge is hit or miss, as you need to hit it right. Cross the storm drain and you’ll fruitlessly grab at the air as you fall to your death, annoyingly sending you back to your last checkpoint.

Another medium-sized gripe is the gunplay, which often sounds a little louder than it should. The reload is released to force you to hold the weapons you receive down and put your gun on your hip to reload automatically. The developers say they are currently working on a manual reload, which will come as a post-launch update. The guns also feel like they’re tilted a little more than they should be, which makes aiming and seeing a good picture a little more annoying than it should be.

Immersion

As a campaign-oriented game, it seems Conclusions it needs to have a strong story to go along with its fun and engaging action. That said, the game’s story isn’t going to win any awards for originality or creativity, but it does provide a solid scaffolding to support a very enjoyable parking experience. At times, it doesn’t quite see its kitschiness, which could have been removed with a fournewall nod to the player. The voice acting also doesn’t feel well directed, which is a shame because it detracts from the already trope-filled narrative. Everything falls into the “too bad is too good” category.

The level design is very good overall, offering many different platform challenges. What few levels there are feels awkward, as pointless as there’s no real penalty for alerting the guard to your presence. Some levels even disable your guns, but no matter what, you can always stab a guy to death, stab someone in the skull, or split ducks in half with a sword, which is fun but so powerful that you can’t leave it all. the illusion that you are going to make your way around the level where you can just cut everyone to pieces.

There’s also a good variety of set pieces for both indoor and outdoor environments to tackle which keeps things interesting throughout the game’s 12 levels.

The sound design is also pretty good, giving you awareness when enemies engage you, when they die individually, and when all enemies are dead in a certain area. This keeps the UI a bit cluttered, as you engage enemies more naturally instead of looking for floating HP bars, etc.

Comfort

As an older sibling, Step: Conclusions it’s surprisingly free for a game that has you jumping off walls and blasting through large, multi-plane environments. However, if you are sensitive to the movements being performed, you may need to take breaks from time to time. I’ve only had a few instances where comfort was an issue, and it was either due to pulling back on the rope (blarg) or encountering a bug when sliding off a wall accidentally.