[Laurel Soup]

I had pretty low expectations for the new Strider, but I bit anyway since both the NES and the arcade version were gigantic deals to me back in grade school. The first hour has been surprisingly solid.

It seems to be structured like the NES game, but Hiryu controls more like the arcade version. So far it sort of has a Metroid Fusion feel to it, in that the map seems pretty huge and open, but directives rush you from place to place. Veering off the obvious trail will bring you to either the typical "door" you can't open yet, a health or energy bar increase, or a collectable thingie. Seeing as combat is a bit more demanding than your standard metrovania, I'm not sure how much the game will suffer when backtracking becomes necessary.

Difficulty-wise it might be a bit sloppy. There's health all over the place, and the patterns of gun fire for the low tier enemies seem to be designed so that even the best timed (non-double) jump will still arc you through one of their shots. It feels kind of weird to have a character who can move so quickly and freely end up playing as a sponge. The couple areas where I've been able to take advantage of crawling along the ceiling to drop down on enemies have felt more rewarding.

Nostalgia-wise I'm pretty amazed at how much they took from the generally maligned NES game. The first couple screens of the first area, most of the music so far, and an enemy or two have been straight from there. His launcher attack from MvC2 is in there too.
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[Laurel Soup]

The NES game is great but it was an easy target as this weird involved drastically different counterpart to a more straight forward game that was being pushed as the flagship of a next gen console back when next gen actually meant something.

The new game does some weird stuff with the side view perspective that will throw me as to when something is supposed to be a wall or a background element, but the set pieces are neat enough that I'm willing to overlook it. The mini-map helps here too. The grey skies aren't quite a match for the lightning storm in the NES game or the starry night in the arcade one though.
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[Laurel Soup]

I love all those shockingly good Master System versions of Genesis games. Sonic and Streets of Rage and Strider...

So the difficulty seems to have ramped up a bit. The boss not too far after I last left off took three tries. He was really pattern based, but it took a couple goes to figure them out, and then to get comfortable with Hiryu's hitbox and stopping speed to dodge between his vertical Dracula beams.
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[Laurel Soup]

I love all those shockingly good Master System versions of Genesis games. Sonic and Streets of Rage and Strider...

So the difficulty seems to have ramped up a bit. The boss not too far after I last left off took three tries. He was really pattern based, but it took a couple goes to figure them out, and then to get comfortable with Hiryu's hitbox and stopping speed to dodge between his vertical Dracula beams.
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[Laurel Soup]

DX11 and 64-bit only.

I'm a couple more hours in. I've gotta a couple more power-ups that in addition to working are your standard key mechanisms, really really expand combat options both offensively and defensively. That bullet sponge sense is gone, at least so much as if you leave a room with a chunk of health gone, you feel like you probably could have played more carefully.
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[Laurel Soup]