You ever play a game that's so close to greatness but just barely misses the mark? That's Xeno Crisis for me - on one hand, it's a fantastic tribute to the Neo Geo in the form of an arcade twin-stick shooter with tight action and gorgeous visuals. On the other hand, it succumbs to popular indie trends that do it no justice, seemingly shoehorning in roguelike elements that are seldom additive to the experience.

If you've played the likes of Smash TV or Robotron 2084, you know exactly what to expect here. Using a variety of guns, grenades and a powerful but risky melee attack, you have to rip and tear your way through seven levels chock full of alien monstrosities. At the macro level, there really isn't much that Xeno Crisis does wrong; some enemies take too many hits and stage 3 just sucks because of its reliance on enemies that burrow underground and waste your time, but otherwise Xeno Crisis is one heck of an adrenaline rush. Your default gun feels amazing and remains effective throughout the entire game, and every melee kill you earn feels sufficiently meaty. The risk/reward balance for using melee attacks is very finely tuned too; melee attacks instantly take out most foes, so if you're willing to risk getting hit, you can immediately take out enemies before they even start moving and shooting. Some levels are so overwhelming with their hordes of foes that this tactic becomes regularly valuable and worth pursuing, encouraging players to get good at dodging and relying on their peripheral vision. Other gun pickups are unfortunately on a timer, leading to situations where you get them with no enemies to use them on, but the majority of them are powerful assets that give you a chance to go hog wild for a bit, empowering the player in times of, well, crisis.

Shooting hordes grants you dog tags that can be used to buy upgrades in between levels. These include the likes of health/speed/attack boosts as well as increased grenade and ammo (yes, ammo, more on that later) capacity. There's even a niche upgrade in the form of the gas mask that protects you from poisonous gas, something's that's only useful in stages 3 and 5 but is extremely so in those two cases. This system provides a small but enjoyable way to give each run a different approach. You can go all in on attack to make the start easier, you can buff speed to make sure your runs go cleanly, or you can save for the gas mask and make your life easier later. You can eventually afford everything if you're thorough enough, but this little bit of decision making turns Xeno Crisis into a game that's more thoughtful than the average game of this ilk.

The game is also a visual treat full of massive bosses that play as well as they look. Each boss has very fair, understandable attack patterns and are reasonable to defeat even with the default gun. Curiously, level 3 doesn't have a boss fight which is a shame considering it's the one in most desperate need of something to break up its monotony.

It's unfortunate that Xeno Crisis wasn't actually a Neo Geo or Mega Drive game released in the appropriate time period, because I probably would have been able to leave it at this and give it 4-5 stars as a classic of its era. But since it was created in the age of modern indies, where so many games need to pull from popular trends to get any kind of attention, Xeno Crisis has ideas that unfortunately do it no favors. Primarily, most aspects of the game are randomized, from parts of the level design to item drops, and that randomless leads to frustration in short order. Games like this are at their best when mastered by a player who knows everything about the game, but with randomness injected, all of the skill in the world can't save you from a streak of bad luck. Everything that drops from enemies is randomized each run. What that means is it's possible that a player who takes occasional hits but otherwise does well will slowly bleed out in one run thanks to a lack of health drops, but in other runs will be able to get far because they got lucky. This same player might blaze through a boss because a weapon dropped mid-fight, but then their next run might leave them to dry wondering why they're doing so much worse. Normally in a game like this, you'd be able to focus purely on getting better and eliminating those mistakes, but knowing that you could luck out at any point leads to sloppiness and reliance on hoping for the best. It promotes bad habits that just make for a less fun game and your victories hardly feel earned because of it.

Worst of all, your basic gun runs on limited ammo and after it's depleted, you have to scramble to grab the ammo crate that, you guessed it, spawns in a random location. Oftentimes this won't be a problem, but those few times where it gets you killed will forever stick in your head and keep you up at night. Many foes take dozens of bullets to kill, so even with a fully upgraded gun, you'll be running out of ammo constantly. Knowing that every time you run out of ammo you're rolling the dice with your life is something that'll chew away at your confidence in short order, which is a terrifying prospect in a game that's as hard as Xeno Crisis.

The icing on the cake is something you'll be familiar with if you followed the game after its release and it's hard not to agree with the majority consensus on it: to see the game's proper ending and actually fight the final boss, you need to finish it without dying once. Naturally, such a Herculean task was criticized by most people who played the game, since such a requirement isn't made (fully) clear until you've failed to meet it at the game's end. The brief story segments in between levels hint at the fact that there's something suspicious about the elixir you use for your equivalent of extra lives, but there's no way to know that using even one will make the game's ending as unsatisfying as possible. Missing out on a bit of story wouldn't have mattered to me, but not getting to fight the final boss is a punishment that I couldn't get over, so I kept playing the game until I eventually nailed it. Turns out, the final boss isn't even all that exciting and it's easier than the level that immediately precedes it!

While the idea of making your extra lives punish you later on for story reasons is an interesting and subversive one, it takes away from the fun of the gameplay. 1CCs should come because a player enjoys the game enough to strive for them, not because they need to do it to get some kind of resolution. The randomization only makes this task worse and it eroded my goodwill away with every subsequent run. Xeno Crisis should have been a game about the journey and not the destination, but by making the carrot on the stick so needlessly harsh and placed in the perfect spot to maximize frustration, it makes peoples' experience with the game one that ends on a sour note they won't soon forget.

I sincerely hope Bitmap Bureau gives a sequel a shot someday. If they remove the randomness and reconsider the ending trickery, I may very well be there day 1! It's a testament to how good Xeno Crisis plays that I didn't immediately drop it as soon as it started asking something ridiculous from me. It was an experience that started off wonderful and gradually wore down my patience and goodwill, each run ending with a lack of drops or a mistake at the end of a hour long run causing me to lean ever so closer to quitting. A non-insignificant amount of each run being spent on stage 3 sure didn't help either! I'm glad I didn't quit and was able to finish it, but I wish my time with it ended on a high note that properly summarized the joy of the experience instead of something that I and others will mostly remember for how mean it was out of nowhere in a game that's otherwise so fun and welcoming.

Reviewed on Mar 16, 2022


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