Can we crown the new king of trailers? Pixel Titans’ latest trailer for STRAFE, titled “All Star,” is the best trailer yet of 2016 and will be hard to dethrone.
Never in my wildest dreams would I imagine recommending anything remotely connected to Smash Mouth’s 1999 chart-climbing single ‘All Star’. Yet Quake-inspired shooter STRAFE has proven me wrong. Pixel Titans, who woo’d Kickstarter supporters in 2015 with a face-melting live-action commercial, have done it again. Titled “All Star,” STRAFE’s latest trailer is the best of 2016 at the very least.
This trailer has it all: action, emotion, breath-taking visuals, comedy, tragedy, gore, more gore, lots and lots of gore, and a double-barreled shotgun. It’s like a modern Hamlet if Hamlet was a Quake mod and Shakespeare watched a lot of Donnie Darko. Okay, so really it’s 1990’s video game graphics mixed, Gears of War’s “Mad World” trailer and an M. Night Shyamalan ending, but isn’t that all we want in life? The answer is yes.
Mostly though, STRAFE’s trailer just seems to capture the essence of the game in one hundred and one seconds. There’s the surprising self-seriousness of creating an authentic Quake-style first-person shooter, the absurdity of actually carrying such an idea out, the silliness of the concept as a whole, and at its heart the pure fun of all of it coming together.
