Forestrike

Written by Rob Larkin on 12/3/2025 for SWI  

”Practice doesn’t make perfect,” my old high school football coach used to say. “Perfect practice makes perfect.” I thought it was a bit pedantic at the time, but the concept is simple enough, and true enough as well. If you practice something in the wrong way, you will perform it in the same fashion. Perhaps for the first time, the same rule applies to a video game. In Forestrike, the margins to victory are thin, but you have every opportunity to practice how each fight will play out before you actually execute. And with perfect practice, you can achieve perfect outcomes.

Forestrike is a 2D fighting game. You take a run through four levels, each consists of branching paths on a map that mostly gives you a binary choice of going down one branch for the listed risks and rewards or the other branch for the alternate options. Each node pits you into a fight against a number of enemies and each level gets a boss at the end.

The hook to the game is foresight. Before every battle, you can initiate a practice run with the pull of the left trigger. Each move is entirely deterministic. So, every move you make in a practice will see the same reactions from the enemies in any other practice, or the real thing. A squeeze on the right starts the encounter for real. You only get one chance for real. Any mistakes, damage, or death carries over to the next node, or ends the run entirely. So, you'd best practice.

With foresight, you have every opportunity to perfect your strategy. This isn’t a button mashing fighting game. Each round takes strategy. You have an arsenal of moves at your disposal, but just as important are the moves the enemy holds as well. Some will ruse out, while others hang back with a projectile. Some will wait patiently with a parry and counterattack locked and loaded, while others charge up an unblockable slam. The strategy comes in choosing which enemies to target, in which order, using which moves you have acquired on a given run.

Maybe you strike first on a dodge-and-counter enemy but quickly dodge yourself through the counterattack pushing the first into the second. Now the two enemies target each other. The first one triggers the second’s unstoppable block-and-counter taking out the first target for you. With those distracted, you charge up a powerful kick to knock a third off a ledge. Then you turn to face the remaining combatant from the initial foray safely with their special move spent. A quick one-two light attack combo downs them and only the fourth and final opponent remains. They toss a knife right at you now that they finally have clear line of sight. A deft parry of the knife mid-air sends it flying back to its owner, with interest.

This little dance plays out because you only have one charge for your own dodge. You could have used it on the opponent with the unblockable counter and taken them down quickly from behind but that would have opened up that line of sight too soon and the knife would bury itself into your back. Or you could stay facing the threat of the projectile only for that first unblockable attacker to regain their composure from the dodge, and you would have to face them twice, this time without the charge needed to step aside with a second dodge.

To remain flawless the strategy must be flawless as well, and you will want to remain flawless because most runs see you with only three hits you can take before the run is over. There are shops and items than can refund hit points but they mostly come towards the end of a level, just before the boss. You’re going to want to keep those options open because even with the right strategy, you still have to actually carry out the execution.

And that becomes the crux of most runs. It might take a few tries to work out the strategy of a given battle, but if you think you’re ready to jump into a fight just because you know what is supposed to happen doesn’t mean you’re ready just yet. Everybody has a strategy until they get hit in the mouth, right?

Some of the attacks and counters are pretty straightforward, but others require precision and timing. The projectiles, for one, or especially boss moves where you might need to position them just right by baiting their jump attack to a precision location to either land on an onrushing pawn or at least block the path of the rush.

Inevitably you are going to get a timing wrong once or twice. Which is why it pays to practice the execution a few times even once you’ve solved the strategy of the fight so that 1) things are less likely to go south to begin with, but 2) when they do, and they will, you don’t lose your whole run. Instead, it’s just another point from the meter with a defiant and satisfying spit of blood as you stand over the vanquished at the end of the encounter, even if they did get that shot in.

The other crux of most runs is what exact moves you’re going to be rewarded with. You win an amount of gold with every battle to be later spent in the shops: either on replenishing health, special items, or occasionally new moves. Otherwise, you select nodes that lead to learning new skills as the primary reward for the battle.

There are four basic disciplines the moves fall into, mostly centered around a dodge, block, or laying on the ground with a banana. No, I’m not kidding about that last one. Each discipline is taught by a master that accompanies you on your run. You unlock the next discipline by at least getting past the first level and first boss. So, mastery is not required but a decent level of proficiency will carry you through that first level. There is also a fifth discipline that I never did unlock that requires actually beating the game with two of the other disciplines, so maybe some more mastery there.

With most of the rewards for the moves, you aren’t just given a skill but a choice of skills to select from. You might select a new skill entirely to get a new kind of power move, or you might select a skill that compliments another you already have obtained, creating some light build crafting elements to the whole package.

So, each run of the game has a certain uniqueness, not just in that the maps and nodes generate ever so slightly different but also in that the skills you unlock will change more dramatically. While no run seems inevitably doomed, some runs do feel more blessed than others.

If you get the unblockable lightning strike after a dodge and pair it with chain lightning that will damage every enemy behind the opponent on the lightning strike, baby you got a stew going! It’s a cocktail that really ups the stakes, as you know this a run that can take you far. Pressure builds and implores you to take that little extra care with each battle. Maybe an extra practice run or two once you nail the strategy because you don’t want a slip and some lazy timing to crash out on a run when you’re really feeling powerful with moves and skills.

The game gives you the opportunity for perfect practice, but it isn’t perfect itself. First of all, there are some concerns with stability. The pre-launch copy was more problematic but, true to their word, a day-one patch resolved most of the issues with the game crashing. Most, but not all. Even on the launch patch I did get kicked out of matches every so often with a crash.

The silver lining here is the game sets up so well to rebound from these. The game saves the run after every battle. So a crash out by the software does not also crush your entire run, just resets you to the start of the last battle. This is a godsend and really mitigates the performance issues, even if they do persist to a lesser degree. As a matter of fact, at one point on a very deep run I actually made a mistake and took some real damage in a late-stage fight only for a crash to give me a second attempt at the same battle. With the reprieve I was able to tackle the challenge flawlessly in the rematch. Nice.

I’m also not overly impressed with the plot presentation. The gameplay is good enough that I don’t think I need to have walls of dialogue interjected every few nodes, but that’s probably just a personal gripe. Speaking of personal gripes: It’s not that I am against pixel art—when done well it can be really powerful—but I found the pixel art presentation of Forestrike to be just meh. For the most part it’s OK and doesn’t get in the way, especially from the actual combat which would have been the real sin. But no, combat is fluid and fine, it’s just that there are certain frames where it’s apparent that your character has a big bald head and then a cutscene reminds you that no, he has luscious black locks under a top knot but the pixel art is failing to deliver on any of that detail.

Overall, Forestrike is a really impressive title. It offers a satisfying challenge, pits your wits against the strategy to unlock the solution, and then your skills against executing on that strategy, and delivers fluid gameplay with replayability in the variety of the shifting nature of each run. It’s big fun in a small package.