The last full-length game to be built directly on the original DOOM engine, Strife is a curious beast, and one that I found very enticing when I first tried it out.

One attempt to sum up this game into one sentence that I saw not too long ago was: "What if DOOM was an im-sim?" After playing this game from beginning to end, I must say that while this game does give off an im-sim-like appearance superficially, it's ultimately not too much of one on the whole; you can't develop any meaningful skills that aren't combat related, and deviating from the intended progression path (whenever possible, which is very infrequently) will probably just result in you getting softlocked. There are a few things you can find which probably can be argued to qualify as some degree of emergent gameplay, such as making sure that you never set off the alarm in the "peaceful" areas (town and borderland commons), trying to keep some of the human enemies out of aggro for as long as you can (which is only possible if you don't go through one of the many unavoidable alarm-triggering gates that are placed in your path, or if there doesn't happen to be a lot of robot enemies around, which will always aggro as soon as the detect you), missions like Harris' request for the chalice, which you can technically finish the game without ever doing (avoiding it is recommended, at least when you first start the game) or the choice between paths and outcomes in the mission you do for the governor early on, the missable health and accuracy upgrades you can get, the shop and inventory system (gold is not farmable in this game, so you must use it judiciously), or the Veteran Edition-exclusive optional quest to find all three of the quite-well-hidden talismans, which will earn you a permanent Berserk upgrade for your melee attack. In retrospect, this game easily has more emergent gameplay and player choice than, say, BioShock— but that of course raises the question of "how much is that, really?" It's a lot less than you have in System Shock, that's for sure, and while we can certainly cut this game some slack in this regard owing to how prototypical it must seem, especially to an audience looking back at it three decades later, it nonetheless still came out two years after that game, and four years after the first Ultima Underworld, so if the goal was to make something a little deeper than "DOOM with some RPG mechanics", there's no denying that there was ample opportunity.

Ultimately though, while there are quite a things that feel like they bring a bit more to the table than the archetypical DOOM progression of "shoot everything that moves and find the exit/key item/kill the boss", the game's uniqueness in the long run is undermined by the fact that the majority of the levels turn out to be exactly that. For some, the most egregious example of this comes in the Proving Grounds map late in the game, which feels like it could have been ripped straight out of DOOM, being little more than an arena filled with strong enemies, elevators and teleporter puzzles where, much like with pretty much every action stage in the game, shooting like hell is the only way to progress. Technically, the game does provide you with a way to outright skip a number of these maps, but that's only possible through a broadly restrictive path which you'll probably want to avoid— more on that in a minute. To its credit though, there is no question that Strife was mechanically quite a bit more unique than DOOM or even Quake, a game with a more advanced engine but with no pretenses of being anything other than a conventional shooter, which dropped the next month and badly overshadowed Strife when it first came out (I feel the pain— Square Enix must pay for the way they handled NEO: The World Ends With You's Steam release). The same can probably be said for the other duo of third-party DOOM engine games, Heretic and Hexen, the first of which is another straightforward shooter, and the second of which is has a more unique nonlinear structure but lacks the storytelling (at least, within the actual game), dialogue, and many of the RPG aspects present in Strife.

So, since the shooty-shoot part of the game ends up being so prominent after all, how does it measure up? I'd say it's largely comparable to DOOM other than the strange distribution of weapons. Whereas Heretic, which I have already brought up, had an original array of weaponry, they largely served as equivalents to the lineup in DOOM, which I would say is not a bad thing— that game is so lastingly well regarded as a shooter for a reason. In Strife, you'll quickly notice that you really don't have very many hitscan weapons at your disposal, and the ones you do have eat through ammo rather quickly; critically, you don't really have an equivalent for the DOOM shotgun other than arguably the Mauler's default mode (worth noting is that the Mauler is an optional weapon which you have to go out of your way to obtain a ways into the game), but seeing as this weapon shares ammo with its secondary mode, which is the BFG equivalent (a mode that, incidentally, you might not realize even exists at first), it can feel awkward using it in that capacity. Something comparable you have in the beginning is the crossbow, but this weapon is both not hitscan and gets heavily outclassed by the other weapons very quickly, with the very sparse distribution of ammo pickups for it in most of the levels relative to the other weapons indicating that you're not really expected to use it for very long.

Beyond that, you'll find rather large numbers of strong enemies the further you progress through the game that will end up draining your stores of ammo if you choose your weapons carelessly, so you'll want to both get the most out of your money at the ammo shops and figure out the best times to use your strongest attacks, such as taking care of Crusader robots with the rather rare grenade launcher ammo or using the aforementioned BFG mode for the Mauler as the fastest way to take down Inquisitors. Doing this right can also help you make the most out of the health pickups you can find in the world— rather than the DOOM style of "you must use it as soon as you pick it up", you get an inventory like the one in Heretic or Hexen, which lets you carry around a modest stockpile of healing items and other assorted buffs which you can then use at your leisure, but in this game they never seem to be enough, especially if you act carelessly, necessitating some replenishment from the shops as well.

Finally, it's worth commenting a bit on the story; it's not super impressive, but both it and the world it takes place in are pretty interesting in their own right. You get a few story cutscenes with a comic book-y style, reminiscent of that which can be seen in the classic adventure game Beneath a Steel Sky (done by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame). This can also be seen in the character portraits during dialogue scenes, and the pixel art between both games is also comparable (while we're on the art style, it's worth mentioning that there's quite a few setpieces in the game which very noticeably draw from pre-Hispanic Aztec iconography and architecture, like the teocalli-style ziggurats and depictions of Quetzalcóatl, the Mexica sun stone, and reclining chac mool sculptures; these don't appear to have any specific reason for being included beyond "it looks cool"). The story itself sees you join a rebellion against the Order, a dystopian cult-like hegemony of mutants and cyborgs which has taken over the world following the fall of a comet that released a virus which killed most and ravaged many others; as you'd expect, just about every subject in that sentence turns out to be more than it first seems. Curiously for a game of the time, there are multiple endings you can get depending on a choice you can do when the game is about half over— but the path that can let you skip a large amount of the maps is the one that locks you into what's known as the "mediocre" ending, so it's probably not something you would want to go for if you're aware of it in time for your first run. One of the more prominent aspects of the game world is how you've got Blackbird, a sultry-voiced mission control companion, in your ear for most of the game, reminding you of your objectives and giving caustic quips while also serving as a motivation to keep you moving forward. Regardless of which ending you get, the way the story develops and concludes leaves a good few details unaddressed, but it's done in a satisfactory fashion that encourages you to think about the implications or possibilities behind the ambiguities rather than just making you confused.

Overall, I'd say that if the look and description of this game tickles your fancy, it's worth checking out. The Veteran Edition remaster by the gigachads at Nightdive also addresses a lot of the softlocks present in the original game as well as adding a modicum of new content, so at this point it's the preferred experience. It might not be a shining example of a proto-im-sim, but even the longer route is not super lengthy and can be finished in less than 10 hours, so as long as your expectations are appropriately tempered, it's certainly a very unique early-FPS experience that's worth having under your belt.