Forestrike

Genre: Action / Roguelike

Players: 1

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Review:

Forestrike is an Action Roguelike released in 2025 on PC and Nintendo Switch. In this game, players take the role of a martial artist in an Asian-themed kingdom in the midst of a takeover by an evil Admiral looking to take the rule of the kingdom by its rightful Emperor. As the last warrior in your order in service to the Emperor, you set out to oust the Admiral and restore the Emperor to power.

This plays out in the form of a series of battles with multiple enemies, played on a 2D plane. Players must use their attacks to subdue enemies, each with distinctive attack patterns. Players and enemies both can take only a limited number of hits, and as such you’ll be making use of your order’s Foresight ability, which lets you play out each battle in your mind prior to taking on the real thing, with this acting as a practice run to ensure you’re prepared for what happens in each battle.

You might be picturing this playing out as a game built around memorization, where you have to remember enemies’ moves and respond as some sort of prescient warrior blocking and deflecting attacks effortlessly when the real battle comes, but the truth is that this practice mode of sorts largely helps to make up for this game’s confusing order of operations, where you’ll have enemies attacking you on either side but who attacks when can often be confusing, and doesn’t always seem consistent.

And while a growing selection of Roguelike abilities does make for unique runs, I don’t think these abilities are nearly as varied and interesting as they should be. And all of this is on top of combat that’s a bit stiff and clunky, taking quite a while to execute all but the simplest attack, and leaving you open afterward. This can make the action more thoughtful and strategic, but it also leads to frustration when you make a slight error in judgment that leaves you wide open for punishment from enemies.

The presentation in Forestrike is good, with some nice 2D pixel art visuals backed by an Asian-inspired soundtrack and joined by digitized shouts of its characters. There’s a lot of strong personality to the visuals and sound here that works really well for the gameplay.

In the end though, I think the gameplay is what keeps Forestrike from being truly great. I think that viewing the combat as a strategic puzzle doesn’t work too well because of the muddled order of operations forcing you to rely on the “Foresight” mode to figure out when enemies will do things. I think that viewing the gameplay through the lens of an Action game doesn’t work because of the clunky combat mechanics. And viewing the gameplay as a Roguelike leads to disappointment at the lack of variety. Either way, I think Forestrike, while not a bad game, still falls short of its potential.

tl;dr – Forestrike is a game that combines Action and Roguelike elements with players taking the role of a martial artist fighting groups of enemies with a “foresight” ability that lets you practice each battle before tackling it for real. This game’s premise has a lot of potential, but it’s held back by slow and clunky combat, enemies that don’t always seem to act consistently, and underbaked Roguelike elements. This is still a fun game, but it feels like it could have been a much better one.

Grade: C+

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