Forestrike Review - Does This Martial-Arts Roguelite Pack A Punch?

Master martial arts!

This may be my personal bias speaking, but 2025 feels like the year of the roguelite.  I’ve played over 30 different roguelites this year (yes, I really did attempt to count and suspect I still missed a few), and it’s hard not to get a little jaded when for every refreshingly unique entry like Blue Prince or Keep Driving, you have hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds upon… I want to say thousands?  Can’t confirm, but definitely thousands, of indie roguelites and roguelikes releasing on Steam that are little more than some other popular game regurgitated onto the store for a quick buck.

I’m not knocking the genre or even some of its less innovative entries, because we’re a nuanced bunch over here at I Dream of Indie Games and know there’s a world of middle ground between the most innovative new roguelite we’ve ever seen and a cheap, lazy knock-off.  But it’s hard not to get a little burnt out on this gameplay loop regardless, and that’s why it’s refreshing to see that Forestrike, a martial arts roguelite with a unique hook I’ve literally never seen before, is here to wake me up a bit.  But does unique always mean good?  Maybe.  Not really.  Sometimes.  In this case?  Let’s find out.

What FOREstrikes me the most about Forestrike is that I’ve never played a roguelite quite like it.  The closest game I can think of is Shogun Showdown, which, first of all, you should prioritize playing if you haven’t already, and second of all, feels sort of like the turn-based analogue to the type of game that Forestrike is.  I won’t go too into the comparison here because I’m not reviewing Shogun Showdown, but in the case of both games, every battle in a run takes place on a single screen, with foes surrounding you and requiring a near-perfect sequence of moves to take them out without receiving damage.  

But in Forestrike, this all happens in real time while enemies charge you, throw things at you, use weapons against you, and all sorts of other extremely impolite things.  And all of that might sound excruciatingly difficult if not for the power of Foresight, the main twist to Forestrike’s formula that completely reinvents what it means to try and fail in a roguelite.

In every battle you can, and arguably should, first activate Foresight using the left trigger.  Doing so will take you into a darker, parallel otherworldly dimension where you can practice the exact fight you’re about to play as many times as you want to get your strategy, sequence of moves, and timing exactly right. 

And when I say as many times as you want, I’m not screwing around – other than foregoing the occasional optional objective or perk demanding you limit your number of Foresight attempts to benefit, there’s no consequence for trying and retrying over and over to get the perfect sequence of moves down.  Once you do, exiting Foresight mode and holding the right trigger will execute the real deal, and require you get it right in a single try or lose one or more chunks of your preciously limited health.  No pressure, of course.  Pulling this off is supremely satisfying, especially given that upon victory, you’re shown a replay of the battle that can be played in slow motion or shared with friends.  As a nice addition, you can even share the battle itself with your friends using a code so they can try it themselves and make it look cooler.  

Well, at least as cool as it reasonably can look.  Listen, if I get any mean YouTube comments it’s probably going to be about this part, but here goes – Forestrike’s muted, mostly grey and brown pixel-art visuals do it a disservice.  I’m not trying to dunk on pixel art as a whole here – I’ve seen it look jaw-dropping in some games – but when you’re aiming for cinematic fights like Forestrike clearly tries to, chunky character models, limited-frame animations, and such a dreary color palette are constantly fighting the game’s attempts to look more than just kind of cool.  I kept wishing for this exact game with Sifu’s visuals substituted in just to see how awesome that would look, but I’m not naïve – budgets were set, decisions were made, styles were chosen, and it’s pointless to dwell on what isn’t – visual style will always come down to opinion, and mine is that despite some moments and environments that are nice-looking in their own right, Forestrike’s visuals simply make the game look less awesome than it wants to.

Enough harping on that – let’s get a little deeper into the gameplay.  In each encounter, a variety of enemies will surround you, each with slightly different move sets, weaknesses, and abilities.  Thankfully, Forestrike does a good job at visually tilting your gaze to different elements in such a way that makes it easier to read the room.  Whichever enemy will attack you next is marked by a small white dot under their feet, any time they’re about to dodge your attack they’ll be outlined in blue, and anytime they’re about to block your attack they’ll have a thin yellow highlight in the direction they’re facing.  Reading the room to determine how to proceed is always a matter of strategy.  Depending on your chosen starting class, you’ll begin with different moves and starting resources.  Playing on the path of the Leaf will give you the ability to dodge one attack and use a light or heavy strike, for example, while playing on the path of the Cold Eye will have you able to block one attack and throw an unsuspecting enemy over your back in lieu of a heavy attack.

Attacking enemies isn’t always as simple as running up and hitting a button either – sometimes they’ll charge you or throw something at you, and you’ll have to deflect the impact back with pinpoint precision (parry haters be warned). Sometimes you’ll also dash your way past an enemy to confuse them enough to accidentally attack one of their buddies.  All of these possibilities are considered with the game’s mid-run upgrades, which often give you new moves or perks that will allow you to catch thrown enemy weapons, flip the direction your enemy is facing, gain health whenever you flip your enemy over your back and knock them out, etc.  Figuring out the exact right sequence of blocks, dodges, punches, flips, weapon throws, and whatever else to clear the room and avoid damage is supremely satisfying and easily the game at its best.  I just wish the game at its best was always what I got.

A substantial chunk of Forestrike is very good.  But the longer I played, the less I wanted to play, and it took me a while to figure out why that was. Ultimately, it turns out that to me, the downside of having a mechanic that allows you to practice a room over and over until you get it right is that when things get tough, the game simply gets less fun.  In a difficult game like any given soulslike, you can play a tricky encounter dozens of times before you get anywhere close to winning.  But when you win – when your skills align and you land every hit just right, it feels magnificent.  You feel like a god, ready to move on and most likely be humbled once more (at least, if I'm the one playing).  Now imagine two alternate scenarios:

In the first one, you replay a battle a dozen or more times, frequently miss the timing needed to deflect a weapon throw or take down an enemy, and grind it out repeatedly until you have it down so perfectly that you run the scene without getting hurt.  That feeling of magnificence lands only briefly, as you realize to your horror that you’re still in Foresight mode, and now you have to do it one more time, without missing a beat.

In the second scenario, you try one dozen times, two dozen times, and so on, before realizing you don’t think it’s literally possible with your current combination of abilities to take down this group and live.  You’ve tried over and over, seemingly exhausted  every possibility, and this battle simply can’t be won.  Every roguelite has some form of that feeling where you make a series of mistakes that lead to a failure and a restart.  That’s part of what makes the genre what it is.  But if you’re enough of a perfectionist to truly use Foresight to ensure you won’t get hurt, Forestrike’s version of that failure is like trying repeatedly to solve a problem on a difficult math test and never making progress, only to learn that the question was bugged and no correct answer existed.  That’s not just mildly disappointing, but deeply annoying, and makes starting another run after that feel like being asked if you’d like a bonus root canal.  Okay fine, maybe that’s dramatic.  None of Forestrike is ever bad, and overall I still enjoyed it.  I just can’t help but feel like its structure is a double-edged sword: both a standout feature that makes it especially unique, and a source of frustration when the martial arts puzzle you’re trying to solve seems to constantly spell out failure.

There's also the matter of the plot. Forestrike is pretty narrative-heavy for a roguelite, and before all the Hades fans out there start salivating let me stop you right there. The writing is fine and the story is serviceable but there's simply too much dialogue and not enough intrigue to make it worthwhile. It's pretty much all skippable so it's impossible to get mad at, but nothing about the plot hooked me in the least and that's a shame because it seems like it's really trying. Oh well. Your mileage may vary there.

Overall, you'll likely get out of Forestrike what you’re willing to put into it. It's a deliciously unique concept with plenty of content for its meager $10 price tag, and though it comes with a handful of caveats I think it's still very much worth playing for anybody that itches for a roguelite delivering more than the same old tropes.

GOOD