The first hint that Striden is a little different comes part way through the trailer above, when a player absolutely decks the glass face of a vending machine and a soda can pops out. The Half-Life throwback seems out of place next to the very dramatic, blue-filtered WW2-ish shooting—but then you get to the bear. Striden is not what it seems in another way, too: At first I clocked it as a Battlefield-like large scale team shooter, but the format is more like a mix of Battlefield and modern extraction shooters, with unique elements: five teams of four fight over resources, strongholds, and anti-radiation medicine over the course of roughly 30-minute matches, winning by accruing the most points.
"Striden is an experience like no other," says creative director Johan Sundqvist. "It's a completely new game mode, environment, and cooperative experience." Striden has classes like Battlefield—Assault, Engineer, Medic, Scout, and Support—but its guns are acquired by looting parts in matches with a "fast-paced" system.
The weapons don't stick to one era, either, spanning both World Wars and the Cold War. This is all explained by the alt-history setting: the craters of tactical nukes that were dropped on Sweden. Minus the radiation, it's an environment the studio knows well.
Developer 5 Fortress is based in Boden, Sweden, which sits just outside the Arctic Circle at a latitude of 65 degrees—you'd struggle to find any game developers further north than that. (If you're making a g.