Review: Strife

In Strife®, you will assume control of a powerful hero. Each hero is uniquely designed to embody a play-style or idea, and heroes are by far the most important aspect of any game of Strife. As a hero, you will decide how the game flows, how quickly it progresses, and whether the outcome is favourable for your team. All Strife heroes are freely available from your very first match!

The main vein of Strife’s influence is reducing player toxicity, with methods that make support roles more clear and simple. A gold share system that eliminates the race-to-last-hit makes playing as the help a little more self-explanatory and easy, while elements such as health regeneration reduce the likelihood of rage quitters and propose a Strategy that is unique to the genre.

Players are also given the option of collecting pets that evolve, which have their own list of abilities, and simultaneously grant passive buffs for their hero. This alongside a crafting system that exists strictly outside of the arena gives the player a few game play options other than just continually jumping into battles.

Strife Gameplay

Strife is one of the few Doom-engine games where what you do in a level can directly affect other levels; this is most drastically seen when the Programmer is killed, which replaces the Castle with the New Front Base and causes several other changes. See the latter article for details.

Another innovative feature is that trigger linedefs are sometimes marked; those which operate lifts or open doors by yellow and black stripes, and alarm triggers in doorframes by yellow lights (activated unless the player is wearing an officer's uniform) or green lights (activated regardless). There are also forcefields, in green or orange (though there is no other known difference), which must be disabled in order to progress.

On modern machines, Strife is best run using a source port such as ZDoom. One thing to beware of is that sometimes "Falling Damage" is set to "Off" by default, even for Strife (and Hexen); for these two games, you should set Falling Damage to "Strife" or "Hexen" respectively, matching the way the original EXE worked, so that if you fall into a deep pit you don't have to restart the level manually.