Sometimes you don’t need an engrossing story or an epic adventure when you sit down for a half hour of gaming fun. Sometimes all it takes is a solid gameplay loop and a leaderboard to tackle. French studio Dream Powered Games have delivered just that with Warstride Challenges, a fast-paced first-person shooter that is as much about beating the clock as it is pulling the trigger.
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Warstride Challenges takes the tight gunplay of modern bullet hells like DOOM Eternal and gives it a stopwatch and a dozen espressos. Each level is a short and sharp burst of anarchy and a true assault on your senses.
Story-Free
There is possibly a story here but I didn’t notice it, if so. This game doesn’t mess around. Warstride Challenges throws you head-first into blasting hordes of demons at a lightning fast speed. You then work your way from bloody gunfight to bloody gunfight across a series of increasingly challenging levels.
Things start out easy. You have to blast one or two enemies and pop the end of level door. However, Warstride Challenges soon adds in new elements like slow-motion, new weapons, switches and the abilty to power slide.
And this train of escalation steams at the right pace as you get time to understand, and eventually master each ability given to you. Alongside this mechanical escalation, each level grows in complexity as you push through them.
Fight the Real Enemy
The real enemy you will face is time. You must complete each level as fast as you can. Your eventually decent time will reward you with a skull. The more skulls you get, the more levels and challenges you will unlock. But above all, the ultimate reward is a place on the leaderboard.
If you have just a sliver of the competitive spirit in you and you enjoy shooting stuff, this leaderboard will sink its hooks into you. It’s a huge draw for many to face off against the world and claw their the top of the list on each level. Or even some arbitrary place above your current gaming station.
Warstride Challenges makes a white whale of its burnt hellscape’s leaderboard and, most importantly, makes it fun.
Warstride’s True Challenge
You should be aware that the game has a number of assistance tools for you to use. These are welcome to learn layouts and improve without the punishing difficulty, but playing with assistance puts your times on a separate leaderboard.
If you want to truly match the game’s ultimate challenge, you’ll have to turn them off and go into the big boy’s leaderboard. This is the pantheon that no casual shall enter and the proper final boss.
Outside of the campaign, Warstride Challenges lets you face off against others online in real time, rather than on leaderboards. There’s also a slick map editor. Bu at the moment this is producing more platforming style levels than run ‘n gun fun.
1990s Neo-Gothic Hellscape
Warstride Challenges features a medieval and gothic visual style as you blast around lava filled catacombs. The presentation uses colour extremely well to let the player eyeball enemies and explosive barrels at a glance as they dart in and out of hell.
The soundtrack of Warstride Challenges is a hard hitting rock affair that does its job well. It gets the blood pumping and has you sitting on the edge of your set. It’s also audible underneath the other soundtrack. Bullets, discombobulation, chaos, and dismemberment.
Speed Overflow
Some will be put off or uninterested by the game’s focus on speed and beating the clock. The character’s jump takes a bit of time to get used to. Jumping is quite floaty and there are times when you’ll be unsure if you’ve actually landed.
Some of the default controls are non-standard for the genre these days. I found having the 360 turn, on clicking the left stick a pain. I would constantly hit click it thinking it was run like 99% of other titles. Neither of these gripes will put off those sucked in by its destructive charms though.
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Warstride Challenges delivers upon its name. Bringing challenge after challenge in a high-octane FPS-fuelled few hours of power. The game’s emphasis on, and successfully implemtation of, leaderboards adds much to innate gratfication of power sliding around corners or landing the perfect headshot in slow-mo.