Forestrike is a martial arts roguelite like no other where you see the future

Using the power of Foresight, in the 2D martial arts roguelite Forestrike you can see how each fight will go down, and it's really damn good. Note: a key was provided to GamingOnLinux.

A beat 'em up fighting game like no other that's for sure, and one of this year's absolute gems. There's no sense in button-bashing here, and that's firmly not the point of it. While you can just jump directly into every single battle, the game is built around your Foresight technique. This is where you enter a special state, where you can test out all your moves, and see what each enemy is going to do. You can do this as many times as you like in each fight. You're supposed to use the ability to explore every possible way to defeat the enemies, and find the perfect solution to each battle.

Nice narrative to go along with it too. Set in a country that was once firmly ruled by a great Emperor, but now an evil Admiral has spread their influence far and wide to pretty much take over. Reaching even as far as your one of your old masters that betrays you. It's up to you, Yu, to try and rescue the Emperor from the Admiral's influence — one fight at a time.

The fighting system is the clear star of the show here, but the narrative elements do wonderfully break things up so that everything doesn't feel so samey which I find a lot of beat 'em ups end up like. Good to have a bit of a break to let your mind rest between a lot of crazy fights.

The interesting thing is that just because you know what's going to happen with Foresight, it doesn't make the game easy though. It's still a thorough challenge to not only pick the right moves to deal with each individual enemy with their different behaviours coming at you, but getting all your own timings right can still lead to a few bloody noses on your end.

I've played tons of fighting games, beat 'em ups and all sorts in between and can't remember a time where they've truly tried to punch through the genre to make something as different as this is. Forestrike is just so incredibly inventive. Fighting games rely on you having a specific amount of health, giving you a limited amount of attempts - but here it just feels so different. You still have your health limit and you need to watch it closely, but the experimentation you can do endlessly on every single fight is quite amazing.

That said, I suppose Shogun Showdown is probably one of the closest to it in terms of some of the ideas. However, that's turn-based, this is real-time and they're still very different overall.

You could do 10 different attempts in Foresight, and still manage to screw it up when you decide it's time for the real thing. Some of the fights even early on can be pretty brutal, and that challenge might actually put a few players off. It's definitely one for people who appreciate the technical side of the challenge. That experimentation is key though, I've seen so many fights in it go completely differently by changing up one specific thing with either what ability I use, or timing something differently and the results can be hilariously unexpected sometimes.

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Another fun addition is the fight re-cap you get, so you can study how the fight went down after beating it. And here, you can grab a special code to share with others, so they can then try the exact same fight you had. Very cool! Absolutely love features like that.

Add to that the rogue-lite side of it, with you picking from random upgrades for your fighter as you go through - each run can be quite different. There's some interesting abilities there like healing up if you manage to get an enemy to hit another enemy that defeats them, poking them in the eyes to stun them and turn them around once per fight and more. You also pick what fights you engage in using a node-based map system of progressing through the game, with each fight having their own different set of enemies and rewards for you.

It did bug me that some of the nodes on the map had you fight without the Foresight ability, which really is the key highlight of the entire game. While yes, it can give you a nice reward, the map is not exactly big and you don't get many movement choices. If they added just one more lane to the node map, this probably would have been a lot better. Just, a few more options for the progression and it would have been perfection there.

The map you progress through also has shops to visit where you can give up certain techniques you've picked, to form a better one. And you can also buy health along with various trinkets to help your run. So there's additional ways here that your run can be different each time too.

The way you build up your fighter through it feels like it leans a little more into deck-builders, or day I say it, survivor-likes. Eventually once you progress through it, you also get to do a run with a few different masters backing you. Each of them come with their own special moves for you.

With all parts together, it's quite brilliant. Loved it. A really fresh feeling spin on beat 'em styled fighting games, with great presentation and it really will give your brain a right-hook to the pleasure centre. Probably one of my favourite releases of 2025.

Worked without issues on Desktop Linux (Kubuntu 25.04) with Proton 10. Valve also rated it Steam Deck Playable, as it may have some small text.