That's what you get when instead of trying hard to bring your vision to life whilst working within the limitations of that time you lazily decide to make your game look bad and call it 'retro'.

It's called tribute... or homage since some premade rooms are exactly like Quake1 or Doom E1M1, E2M2 etc not being game in '96 by gameplay but by summary of things that relieve themes from these titles be it art style, monsters and so on, overall atmosphere and experience. Also back then there were some games that re-shuffled experience or even levels so the only new thing is always permadeath but some titles already had that in some additional game mode...

What do you mean with visually coherent? The muddy brown color palette in Quake?

To quote Zero punctuation’s take on Quake:

“[...] if you want to find the evolutionary ancestor of brown and miserable modern shooters then Quake makes a pretty good starting point, cause it lacks all the joy and humor of its stable mates Doom and Duke Nukem 3D and is persistently the color of a wet weekend at a Siberian logging camp. But for all that it’s still a retro shooter of its time: A high octane shooter where you move faster than a hairless Philippino boy through a crowded bath house and the story never gets in the way of the action.[...] The color scheme and repetitive levels were probably scraped off of the Carmack tarmac while the gameplay is characteristically solid. I like that every monster is clearly distinct—from each other, I mean—if not from the background since everything looks like it just dropped out of a sewage worker’s nose and all have a different role in life. A Knight harasses you in tight spaces, a Fiend harasses you in the open. There’s the floating Scrag whose job is to molest you in the hard to reach places and then there’s the Ogre whose job it’s to get f*cked [...] I hope you like brown castles because Quake has every imaginable iteration of such:
It’s got brown castles, it’s got ochre fortresses, it’s got sepia strongholds, the works is like a school field trip to continental Europe during a major cholera outbreak. But you know, there’s still quite a strong atmosphere to it. [...]”
This guy has a few very good points about Quake (if we only talk about purely 3d shooters from the mid-90’s.
If we allow Duke Nukem 3D as well, then there’s a lot more variation in color and less “coherence”, despite the use of sprites instead of 3D models for assets and enemies.

STRAFE is not a Quake clone, it’s a 3d shooter using a lot of typical elements of 90’s shooters, and succeeds more or less at it. It’s flawed, just like Quake and Duke Nukem 3D were. Some weapons mechanics in STRAFE are rather odd
I remember the game reviews of Quake of that time (back then when we kids still bought computer gaming magazines). And there was quite a lot of harsh criticism of this game for its bland color palette and several shortcomings in terms of gameplay, the unnecessary implementation of two different nailguns, the odd single “boss fight” (not counting Shub Niggurath)...

I love Quake despite it’s flaws, and I love Duke Nukem 3D. I only think that some people here have rather odd expectations about what STRAFE should be, compared to the “immaculate” Quake of the old days.
STRAFE is far from flawless but it’s not terrible as some people here make it look like, either. To me, STRAFE is more like Quake with the happier color palette of Duke Nukem 3D that plays quite nicely, has some odd weapons mechanics and a few other flaws. I would like more customizeability like console commands, setting fixed RNG seeds to enable the player to replay a run, things like that. Customizeable RNG seeds would also enable users to share the most interesting results of the procedural level generation. And it would enable different users to do speed runs of the same levels.

That was the vibe I got from what I saw. I can only hope it won't be popular enough to spawn more titles of similar nature.

I would assume they mean that their design is more coherent. Whereas this looks ugly for the sake of it and advertises it as a feature.

How many people are going to confuse Strafe with Strife, which actually was made in 1996?

When I look at Quake and the screen shots of Strafe it's no question for me which one looks better. And Quake does not require 1 GB of VRAM (and 4 GB of RAM)...

Agreed. Having recently replayed a load of 90's FPS's, I don't see not being able to save, reloading throws away existing ammo, all guns feel like shotguns due to over-the-top bullet spread, weak procedural generation levels, etc, as anything remotely representing "90's FPS mechanics".

- Quicksaves were prevalent on virtually all FPS's from early 90's Doom 1 right through until the late 2000's with semi-standard convention of F5/F6 and F9.

- Weapons felt and played differently. A rocket launcher, minigun, BFG9000 and shotgun in Doom all had very different styles of gameplay. Same with an Ethereal Crossbow, Dragon Claw and Phoenix Rod in Heretic.

- Levels were hand designed, quite often with choke-points, secrets, traps, trigger plates, platforms, branching / circular paths or other intelligent environmental features possible even in the primitive Doom engine. I have no idea where the "90's = procedural maps" thing came from for Ziggurat / Strafe.

- Ammo and health were sparse but not over the top as many modern "fake 90's" games try too hard to "showcase" by over-exaggerating.

- For gameplay, health was non-regenerating and finite per level, there were no 2-3 weapon limits, and combat was high move speeds + circle-strafe. But there was far more to it than that and gameplay could often be made interesting. Eg, when you were low on ammo in Doom you could "play" different types of monsters against each other (or lure into crushers / other traps, etc, as an ammo substitute). On really hard maps, gameplay was anything but "simple" vs modern cover-based bullet sponges or "simon says" QTE's.

^ That's the 90's era I remember, and so far haven't really found any modern game dev who "gets it" that the enjoyability factor was largely "talented level designers + freedom of gameplay" (clever map design, quicksaves, no weapon limits, etc), not simply slapping Minecraft textures into Unity Engine then pretending it's "old school" simply because they upped the run speed and scrapped the "cover" button...

I really want to like these kinds of games, but the more I see of "fake retro" gameplay, the more I just want to fire up one of many decent OpenGL source-ports (GZDoom, etc) and blast through actual 90s / early 2000's games again.

I played the game until my first win and I don´t get the criticism. Here are a few points of criticism from reviewers that I would like to clarify.

1. You only have one main weapon.

It´s true, you choose one of three main weapons that you keep through the whole run. BUT you can change the firing mode of that weapon in almost every level. Depending on the random distribution of special stations. At these stations you can turn your weapon into something totally different, e.g. turning the machine gun into a nail gun with exploding nails. And by the way, in over fifteen runs I did not run out of ammo a single time. I did not even fall under 30 ammo clips. So there is plenty of ammo even for the worst FPS players.

2. You lose ammo when reloading.

True, but it does not matter. See point above

3. All other weapons have only one ammo clip and get useless afterwards.

Yes, but you will find a lot of them. And all are useful for certain tactics. You have to play strategically. After a few runs, I know exactly in which corners to use the shotgun or the pistol. And most of the time I carry more than one of them.

4. You always have to start from the beginning and play the first levels over and over.

No, you don´t have to. Find out how to activate the teleporters.

5. The weapons have artificial bullet spread.

The shotgun has a wide bullet spread and is used best in close quarters. The machine gun is accurate at mid-range. The rail gun is accurate at long-range but is slow. All of this is adjustable with weapon mods that you have to find in the levels. That´s not different than usual. Where is the problem?

6. It does not play like back then 1996. It is not like Quake or Doom.

No it is not. It is a game of its own. The first world is reminiscent of Quake 2. The following worlds are different. But it plays like an old school shooter imo, with one difference. You don´t need to play it as fast paced, circle-strafing, bunny-hopping shooter. I like a sniper like approach and that is totally possible. Usually you see the enemies before they notice you, so you can sniper them with the rail gun from a distance. It´s a lot of fun.

So, I think the bad reviews mostly come from the fact, that the developers dared to compare their game with the 90s generation of shooters, what seems to be a real sacrilege in some peoples view. I for one like the game very much. I will try to post my opinion as review, if it is not to long. Nevertheless I will give 4 stars.

So it's just like a 90s shooter, except completely different.

No, comparing itself to a 90s shooter isn't sacrilege, it's false advertising.

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I mean "visually coherent"...don't really think that needs further explanation? And yeah, Quake wasn't particularly colorful, not sure how that's relevant. The thing is, "90s" isn't really a style, it's a limitation. The games at the time still had art direction and attempted to make the best graphics given what the hardware was capable of. If you intentionally use late 90s as a limitation, that's not an excuse for not having art direction or not making an attempt to have good art within the limitations.

I'm actually kind of interested in Strafe (visuals aren't everything), but they could have done a better job with the style, while still being 90s low-poly and stuff.

The capitalisation in this context makes the word unambiguously a proper name, and therefore certainly a reference to the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis.

Note that if they had instead written "holocaust", it would be fine.

This was discussed in the previous thread, and the description remains unchanged since then, so I think we can safely say that it is 100% intentional (as otherwise someone would have rushed to fix it).

It's a use one time use gimmick... literally

youtube search strafe vv1n if you want to see what it does...

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