Capcom’s Strider reboot puts Hiryu back on the board, and the board is Kazakh City.
The 2014 release, out in February for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Windows, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, is a full restart of the 1989 game. Double Helix Games built it with Capcom’s Osaka studio. You play as Strider Hiryu, the Striders’ top assassin, dropped alone into a fortified metropolis to kill Grandmaster Meio.
That is the whole pitch, and the game holds to it. What follows is how the pieces land.
Trailer, via PS360HD.
Hiryu, Alone in Kazakh City
The Striders send one agent. Not a squad, not a strike team. Hiryu goes into Kazakh City by himself, past the Grandmaster’s forces, through soldiers, machines and lethal defenses, toward the man at the top.
The game frames this as a retelling of the “core Strider story,” the long-running feud between Hiryu and Grandmaster Meio. It pulls from the first arcade Strider, the NES console game, Strider 2, Hiryu’s Marvel vs. Capcom fighting appearances, and the original manga from Moto Kikaku. That is a lot of history to fold into one run, and Strider folds it in without stopping to explain itself.
Hiryu is a master of stealth and swordsmanship. The game treats him that way. He does not creep. He moves.
The Cypher and What It Does
Hiryu’s main weapon is the Cypher, a plasma weapon that can take several properties. It is the center of combat, and it is where Strider gets its range.
The Cypher can scorch enemies or freeze them in their tracks. It can deflect a host of bullets. Those are three different answers to three different problems, and the game wants you switching between them.
The plasma-charged Cypher is described as indestructible, which matters less than it sounds. The weapon never breaks. The question is whether you are using the right property at the right moment.
Upgrades for the Cypher come from exploring Kazakh. That is the loop: move through the city, find the upgrade, hit harder.
A City You Can Climb
The environment is freely explorable. You search it for weapons and items, and the search is not decoration.
Hiryu jumps, climbs and runs through the game world with the speed and agility of a ninja. He climbs surfaces to gain extra height. He engages the enemy from virtually any direction.
That last part is the design thesis. Strider is a side-view game, but it does not play like a flat one. Height is a resource. Direction is a choice.
The world is massive and interconnected. Kazakh City is not a set of stages with doors between them. It is one place.
What Stands in the Way
The enemy roster is built to punish a player who settles into one rhythm.
- Cybernetic soldiers
- Immense bio-mechanical creatures
Those two categories cover a wide spread, and the game uses the spread. Soldiers test your speed and your control of the screen. The bio-mechanical creatures test whether you have learned to move.
Strider promises engaging and unique combat challenges from that mix. It delivers on the variety more than on the difficulty curve, but the variety is real.
Here is how the two ends of that roster compare:
| Enemy type | What it tests | How Hiryu answers it |
|---|---|---|
| Cybernetic soldiers | Speed, crowd control | Fast movement, engaging from any direction |
| Immense bio-mechanical creatures | Positioning, height, timing | Climbing for extra height, engaging from any direction |
The table is not a difficulty ranking. It is a map of what the game asks you to do, and the two columns do not overlap much. That is the point.
The Story It Retells
The setup is dystopian and blunt. A tyrannical Grandmaster Meio rules. The elite ninja organization known as the Striders dispatches its most skilled assassin to end his reign.
Hiryu slips past the Grandmaster’s forces. He cuts a path through legions of soldiers, machines and lethal defenses. He draws closer to a confrontation with the despot at the heart of the empire.
That is the arc. One lone warrior, one relentless infiltration, one oppressive empire. Strider does not complicate it, and it should not. The 1989 game did not complicate it either.
What the reboot adds is scale. Kazakh City is sprawling and heavily fortified, and the game lets you feel both.
Where the Reboot Sits
Strider is a hack and slash game with platform and adventure bones, played from a side view, built for one player. Every one of those choices is deliberate, and they fit together better than they have any right to.
The comparison that matters is not Strider against its 1989 original. It is Strider against what a 2014 action game was expected to be. This one is shorter, flatter in structure, and more interested in movement than in spectacle. It does not chase the third-person blockbuster. It stays side-on.
That is a real limitation and a real strength. The camera never swings around to show you the city. You see Kazakh City the way Hiryu does, in profile, and the game trusts you to care about the space anyway.
The Cypher properties are the best idea here. Scorch, freeze, deflect. Three verbs, one weapon. Most games with a plasma sword would give you a combo tree. Strider gives you a toolkit and lets the enemy type decide which tool you need.
The Marvel vs. Capcom borrowings are the strangest part of the mix. They are in there, alongside the manga and the NES game, and they do not announce themselves. A player who knows the fighting games will catch them. A player who does not will simply find a move that works.
The Verdict on Strider
Strider earns its 7.8 out of 10. It is a confident reboot with a clear idea of what it is: a fast, side-view hack and slash about a ninja cutting through an empire, with a weapon that does three jobs and a city built for climbing.
The weaknesses are structural. The story is a retelling, not a new one, so anyone who knows the Strider saga knows where this ends. The enemy variety is real but the game leans on two categories, and the bio-mechanical creatures carry more weight than the soldiers do. The exploration loop — find Cypher upgrades in Kazakh — is sound but thin, and it never becomes the reason to keep playing. The reason to keep playing is the movement.
Where Strider succeeds is in refusing to apologize for its shape. It is a side-view game in a year of open worlds, and it uses the side view to do things an open world cannot. Engaging from any direction, climbing for height, deflecting a wall of bullets — those are side-view pleasures, and Double Helix and Capcom Osaka understood that.
The 1989 original inspired a generation of third-person action titles. This one does not try to inspire anyone. It tries to be good at being Strider, and it mostly is.
Buy it for the Cypher. Stay for the climbing. Do not expect the story to surprise you, and do not hold that against it.
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