REVIEW: Strikers Edge


Title	Strikers Edge
Developer	Fun Punch Games
Publisher	Plug in Digital, Playdius
Release Date	January 30th, 2018
Genre	Multiplayer Arena
Platform	PC, PS4
Age Rating	T For Teens
Official Website

Strikers Edge is a 2D, top-down multiplayer arena game. While that may seem like a really complicated genre, the game is actually really simple to understand. Simple doesn’t always mean a game is bad, sometimes it just means that the gameplay is easy to understand and follow. So I guess the question remains, which category does this game belong in? Well, join me and find out.

Let me start by saying that this game is really pretty. The arenas and characters we got were really well designed and matched their class and playstyle almost to a tee. My personal favorite to play had to be the Archer, and I also really love her design. My issue then lies with the fact that while the art does look really good and I like the character designs, there just isn’t much variety when it comes to gameplay. From the get go you’re given all 8 characters and all 4 arenas to fight on. All of the characters felt the same to me, and didn’t vary too much apart from their special moves. The lack of variety, especially if you play 2 on 2 matches, really takes away from a lot of the replayability that games like this thrive on. I did encounter a few texture glitches, particularly on the loading screens, but those were few and far between.

It’s not just the lack of variety in the characters and arenas either, there’s also a very low variety of modes. You get a campaign mode, a versus mode, and an online mode but that’s really it. To me the game could have really done with a practice mode to try out each of the characters before you go to play them, or even just a single player mode where you could face off against a computer player. Your job is just to win three out of the five possible rounds, and that’s it. It doesn’t change at all no matter what mode you do, which is fine albeit a little disappointing that there aren’t more options. The only real single player mode involves a campaign mode, and that isn’t exactly the best thing in the world either.

The campaign mode was the most disappointing to me. I genuinely liked the look of the characters, and got excited when I learned that they each had their own story mode. However, that excitement soon dwindled when I learned that they were only about 15 minutes long each, and most of the story was just told through a text box after each match. The stories themselves weren’t half bad, but being told the full extent of them through stills and text boxes just felt a little off to me.

That’s not the only thing that felt off to me though, the controls didn’t really help in that department. This game has a really steep learning curve, which I’m used to mostly, but it’s made even steeper by the controls. On the PC, I would guess that you move with WASD and move the mouse to aim, but here you move one control stick to aim and one to move. That’s probably obvious to a lot of gamers, but in a fast paced game like this it was really hard to be as precise as the game wanted. This isn’t usually too much of an issue, as most games get a smoothing option when ported to console. However they seem to have gone a little overboard, making the controls seem really floaty. I found it really hard to aim precisely while at the same time dodging whatever was coming at me. It all felt really clunky and awkward to maneuver.

“Disappointing” seems to be the word that I use a lot of in this review, and it’s exactly how I feel. This game had a lot of promise that I just didn’t feel it lived up to. Don’t get me wrong, this is still an alright game if you like multiplayer arena games, but $15 seems like quite a lot for a 2 hour campaign and only a few modes. I ended up having fun when playing it with a few friends, but if you’re just looking to buy this game to play on your own on the PlayStation 4, I can’t really recommend it unless you enjoy this genre immensely.