3 pre-game elements and impressions of Strife’s alpha-test PvP combat

I didn’t get to go to DreamHack Winter (DHW) 2013, but I managed to experience the DHW Strife alpha PvP build anyway! Here’s a more in-depth look at its three pre-game features — pets, crafting, enchanting — as well as our impressions of the game’s multiplayer mode. For those of you who missed it, you can check out our first impressions of Strife here.

Pets

Strife, as you all might have guessed, is an adorable game. That’s probably not the adjective S2 Games was aiming for when they designed it, but let me tell you again: Strife’s art style is adorable and so are its pets.

Pets in Strife are combat-active ones, and can be fed to level up. Each pet starts off as an adorable little critter, then looks meaner and more bad-ass as it grows. A certain amount of food will be dropped at the completion of each game, that you can then use to help your pets grow. I couldn’t figure out how the amount of food dropped is calculated, though.

Each pet level improves on a different spell, and each pet comes with four spells. I managed to have just two games with the build, but it seems as though your pet can only use one active skill while in-game, because only one hotkey is assigned to that.

You also don’t have to control the pets, but they don’t attack; they are simply present to provide passive buffs and to help you out with their single active skill. Only three pets were unlocked during my playtime, but you can unlock more with Strife’s virtual currency: seals.

Crafting

Crafting allows players to imbue custom elements with their existing items. Not happy with the default boots you pick up at the beginning of the game? Combine items with it and craft another iteration of the item: one with additional hitpoints or attack speed. Crafting makes use of ore, which, like food, drops after every game.

Enchanting

Enchanting is the only natural step after crafting. Using resources (which also drop after every game), players can bump up their crafted items’ stats with bonuses. Enchanted items follow the item color code common to most games. Common items are green, rare items are blue, and epic loot is purple.

There’s also an option to temper the crafted item. Tempering makes the item permanent, thought the DHW Strife build did not give me an option to properly test this out. Publishers Asiasoft were quick to note, however, that the DHW build is an alpha one, and the colour codes may change in the future.