In Warstride Challenges, it’s rare for one of the titular challenges to last longer than 10 seconds.
The pistol-packing parkour game from Dream Powered Games was one of two first-person shooters I played at theFocus Entertainmentbooth atPAX Eastlast weekend. Grant Stewart, lead designer on Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, said, “We’re vaguely hoping that people will get into speedrunning it.” Five minutes after that conversation, I was already several levels deep into Warstride Challenges. The game’s speedrun aspirations are clear from the first mission.
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Converted to real-world distance, that level would cover about 10 feet. It took me, at most, four seconds. Over time, the levels get longer, but they’re neverlong. Once you hit a certain point, the game lets you play super levels that stitch a bunch of the previous fun-sized ones together into one regular mission. But even those are designed to, ideally, be completed in a minute or less.
Warstride Challenges' mechanics are centered on a fixation with moving fast. Enemies take one or two hits to kill and they’re almost always sprinting toward you, demanding a quick draw (or, the worst fate possible in this kind of game, turning around). Levels are mostly made up of ultra-tight corridors. Crouching while you run makes you slide extremely quickly. The quick restart is right there on the R key in case you need it. And, if you want to take a break without actually pausing, you can press the right mouse button to enter slomo, facilitating extra precise head clicks.
Over the course of the 25 minutes that I spent with Warstride Challenges, it threw plenty of complications into the basic run-and-gun action. I got multiple weapons, with a shotgun that was better for blowing enemies away at close range and a rifle that excelled at precise shots from afar. Eventually, I got to missions where you needed to kill every enemy to open the gate at the finish line, which meant making smart use of exploding barrels positioned near groups of opponents throughout. There were switches I needed to hit to open doors, but which could only be hit after all the enemies in the area were dead, complicating things further. And, always, there was the stopwatch at the end, letting you know just how quickly you managed to deal with the cornucopia of obstacles the game placed in your path.
Overall, Warstride Challenges wants to throw as many,ahem,challenges at you as possible, while still pushing you to go as face-smooshingly fast as a fighter pilot blazing down the runway. There are multiple versions of each level with each one upping the difficulty one more step. The game has been in early access for nearly a year at this point, first hitting Steam in April 2022. Now, the three-person team is hard at work prepping the full release — which will expand the game’s launch to include PS5 and Xbox Series X/S — for some time in the first half of this year. May it arrive as fast as possible.
