It’s easy to tell when a game meant for consoles comes to PC. Sometimes it’s the obvious, like the control instructions still telling you gamepad keys instead of keyboard keys. And sometimes it’s a little more subtle. Striker’s Edge belongs on a console. And while it’s out for modern consoles as well as PC, its spiritual home is on the Super Nintendo, where it would be the kind of obscure game you’d rent from the video store (we used to do that when dinosaurs roamed the earth) and then play all weekend with your friends, yelling and hollering the whole time.
Developer: Striker’s Edge
Price: $14.99
Platform: PC (reviewed), PlayStation 4
MonsterVine was supplied with Steam code for review
It’s dodgeball, you see, but with spears and bows and axes and other ranged weapons, all of which work slightly differently. There’s a fighting game-style variety of characters, all of whom have different looks–the valkyrie, the hulking knight, the sexy mind-controlling sorceress–and slightly different special attack gimmicks.
What it comes down to is simple: You can shoot your spear (or whatever passes for your main attack), you can hold down the button for a special attack or follow it up, you can block, or you can dodge. That’s pretty much all there is to it. The element of strategy is largely down to frantically running around and dodging attacks while trying to hit the other guy while they frantically run around and dodge attacks.
Combat takes place in a best 2-of-3 format, which is nice when you lose but kind of frustrating when you win. There’s not a lot of variety in the attacks and they don’t quite hit hard enough to be satisfying, which makes each game feel exceedingly long. It’s drudgery to slug through a match that you just can’t finish off.
There’s a tutorial and campaign for figuring it all out and learning to play. The story is something about gods and demons, but the fun part is seeing all the characters running into each other, so you get a very light Rashoman-style take on the events of the game, watching everything from different points of view. There’s some nice stuff like Twitch integration. But the real meat of the game is the multiplayer.
And that’s unfortunate, because there’s nobody there.
Striker’s Edge is clearly meant to be played online–the giant PLAY ONLINE button in the top left of the interface was my first hint–but on the PC version, there’s no one playing it. They’re not in Quickmatch and they’re not in the variety of interesting and potentially appealing team matches and custom options.
I couldn’t find a single other player at 8pm on a Friday night. I tried several times throughout the weekend to get a single multiplayer game of any sort going, but never had luck when I waited 3-5 minutes at a stretch, and that’s 2-4 minutes more than I usually have the patience to wait for.
The local multiplayer might be interesting, but I’m not buying several copies and throwing a LAN party in my house, even if I had friends, which I don’t and that’s why I was at home at 8pm on a Friday.
If it was $5 or so, I’d say give it a spin for the campaign and characters and because you’ll bathe in nostalgia remembering picking out a game for the weekend., but for $15 with a major game mode you can’t really play, it’s hard to recommend.
The Final Word
It might be an interesting game, if anyone played it.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 3 out of 5 – Average
