What's the most important component of a good FPS? Is it violence? No. Is it smart level design? That can certainly make your shooter interesting and memorable, but it isn't a prerequisite to enjoyment. Is it fast movement? Again, that won't hurt your chances. But like all these other hallmark elements of FPS design, it isn't as fundamental as ensuring that your guns are fun to fire.
Go back to any of the classic shooters of the mid-90s, and you will find that no matter how badly the graphics have aged, how weird their control schemes are, the weapons they place in your pixelated hands feel absolutely fantastic. Doom's shotgun, Quake's Nailgun, Half Life's revolver, each of them is a masterclass in audio/visual feedback, a bucking, roaring, arm-juddering bringer of death. It's why whatever else they did right or wrong, you can go back to any of them today and still have a great time from the first shot onwards.
This is exactly what I did while playing through Strafe, because from the moment I entered Pixel Titans' procedurally generated love-letter to 1996, my hands and my brain were telling me something wasn't right. The sensation was so unsettling that I had to check I wasn't misremembering my own misspent youth turning big brown polygons into smaller red polygons. So I went back, and undertook a crash-course in the formation of the first-person shooter, 1993 to 1998.
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