“If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.” – Patches O’Houlihan from the movie Dodgeball
Imagine that quote, but replace “wrench” with “arrow”, “axe”, “shuriken” or even “lance”. That’s basically the premise of Strikers Edge, “medieval dodgeball with weapons, ancient warriors and special powers” as the developers themselves put it. The game is simple – you choose from one of the eight playable characters and then chuck fatal projectiles at one another until one of you dies. Once one of you wins two rounds, the game is over and whoever is left standing wins!
The game does get a bit deeper than that, of course. You have a health bar, so first blood isn’t fatal; you wouldn’t be a very special hero if you couldn’t have a few javelins thrown into your face before you died! Headshots do more damage than regular hits of course, but it’s a very minor difference so you and/or your opponent will end up as pincushions by the end either way. There’s also a stamina bar, so you can’t just throw stuff nonstop, and even your quick little dodge roll uses up stamina. Then there’s the block button that blocks whatever might hit you right that moment, and you even get a bonus for block this way – a few hit points healed, quicker attacking temporarily or quicker movement temporarily for example – but you have a limited number per round.
Finally, each character has a charged attack that does something special, and because it takes a bit of time to charge up it doesn’t even use your stamina. These charged attacks vary greatly by character, such as a barbarian who throws two axes that arch around an enemy or an archer who shoots an explosive arrow. You get unlimited charged attacks per match, but you slow down while charging and getting hit before firing the attack makes you lose your progress on charging it. To make these charged attacks even more special, almost every character’s charged attack has an optional attack to go with it. The valkyrie, for example, can charge her javelin to where it leaves a trail on the ground when it’s thrown. Her extra attack ignites that trail and does damage to anyone standing on it when you trigger it. The spartan’s charged attack throws his shield Captain America style, bouncing around a bit, and his extra attack causes the shield to explode and do damage around it.
When all of this comes together it’s a hectic dance of aiming, throwing, moving, dodging and dealing with the arena you’re dealing with. Hearing the announcer yell “headshot!” when you hit an opponent in the head is awesome, and when you’re near death time will slow down whenever a projectile is near killing you. This can make it easy for your enemy (or you) to dodge, but it also gives you (or your opponent) time to line up your next shot and fire while the slow-mo is ending. There’s also a ridiculously satisfying CLANG sound when two projectiles strike one another in mid-air, and the music is energetic. Also, as I hinted at, the arenas can be trouble themselves – there are 4 total arenas, and each is fairly different. One has rocks to hide behind that can be destroyed with enough hits; another has giant icicles strike the battlefield every so often that can do damage if they hit you or make for fragile barriers if you dodge them; one even takes place on warring battleships that have destructible barrels to hide behind and shield-wielding soldiers that will shove you further toward the middle of the battle if you get too close.
The game has three main modes – campaign, local multiplayer and online multiplayer. I wanted this game the second I heard about it because I love playing games with my gal, but we typically like battling against enemies together more than against one another. Unfortunately, local multiplayer doesn’t allow for adding AI enemies, so you can’t play 2v2 with another player against AI. Sadly, being unable to play with my gal against AI enemies really took away the main reason I wanted this game. It also means you can’t select an opponent, an arena and a difficulty to practice against a particularly difficult AI foe.
Typically with a competitive game like this the real fun is in online multiplayer. Sadly, it’s pretty much impossible to find a match, and while I have had a little luck with 1v1 matches I never once successfully loaded into a 2v2 match. Once you’ve started searching for either a 1v1 or 2v2 match you’re returned to the main menu and (presumably) can let it search infinitely until either a match is found or you cancel it. You’re not able to actually play while waiting, though; the menu only allows you to see your stats and mess with the basic game options. I tried at various times on weekends and weekdays: most of the time I couldn’t find a match at all, but one day I matched several games in a row. The first match took over 5 minutes of waiting but following that the rest were 2 or less, and a few were mere seconds! Out of all the games I played I only matched up with three unique people. One was far less good than I was and the matches were easy, the second was far better than me and quickly annihilated me every game and the third was just a bit better than me, so it was more fun and tense. Unfortunately, in any game relying on internet there’s also the potential for lag – two of my games, including one that was really close and I was in the lead on, had such dreadful lag that I couldn’t even move for over half the match. Another, against the player who was far better than me, was the only one where my opponent lagged and I almost felt guilty when I lined up my aim and fired shot after shot into his face til I annihilated them.
Since I was disappointed by local multiplayer and online multiplayer was nearly unplayable, I spent the majority of my time with the campaign. Like any other competitive game this mode is made to help you get some solid practice, and the developers put a good amount of work into making it a fun little run for each character. There are 3 levels of difficulty for the AI, and each of the 8 characters has their own unique short story and around 5 battles each. The last campaign I ran, the archer, had only 4 battles and 3 of them were in the same arena, but other campaigns involve more battles in more varied arenas. One of the cool things about it is that if, say, you play the campaign as the knight and fight the ninja, then when you play as the ninja you’ll fight that same fight from the other side! There are also special battles, including some fun 2v1 battles or even one where your enemy comes partially back to life before they’re finally defeated. Once you complete a campaign you’ll get medals in your campaign character select screen for that character depending on the difficulty you chose, although with all of the completions I got on easy mode I never unlocked anything new (all 8 characters and 4 arenas are unlocked the second you start playing!).
While I can’t speak on how the game feels on Steam, the game gets a little painful after a while on PS4. The controls are all based on the two sticks, the triggers and the right and left buttons. The face buttons have no use whatsoever, so you end up using claws to play the game and after dodging a bunch, throwing five million projectiles and setting off chain reactions of charged attacks I ended up a bit achy. This isn’t too terrible though since the repetitive nature of the game means you probably won’t play it very long each time you pick it up anyway. It’s worth mentioning that I’ve seen some videos of people playing this game, and the 2v2 matches with a bunch of friends playing together look SO fun. Even in the campaign matches it’s a lot more fun playing 2v2 or even 2v1 than it is 1v1, so it’s a real shame you can’t just create this setup with AI to fill in the gaps. If you have regular friends you can play with it’s definitely worth looking into; it’s definitely an “easy to learn, difficult to master” game. However, if you really want to play against random people online or want to be able to customize your single player experience a lot, it’s hard to recommend this one at full price.
I received a free review copy of this game on PS4 in exchange for my honest opinion.