Xotic Review

Xotic boasts itself as an arcade style first-person shooter, and looking at the initial screenshots, I knew I was going to be in for a rather weird and wonderful experience, with visions of coloured orbs and pickups seemingly everywhere, and a rather large insect on my arm, it certainly wasn't going to be anything conventional.

The basic story to Xotic, is that an Alien Orb is ravaging worlds, leaving behind a trail of infection and organisms, and you, as the saviour, are here to clear out and repopulate the worlds with seeds of new life. Of course this task isn't done with anything we've seen before, weed killer would be to easy, for this task we have a weaponised symbiotic creature we wield, named the Macroterra, which in essence, is a rather large bug.

It's certainly a weird and wonderful storyline, and it surprisingly fits in perfectly with how the game plays out. Its clear they had a good vision when developing the title, something a lot of developers often seem to miss these days.

The general gameplay of Xotic throws you into a select world, in which you pretty much have to destroy and collect everything you see. It's a simple concept, easy to pick up, but very difficult to master!

At first, I found Xotic almost calming, therapeutic in some ways, with wonderful colours all around, and soothing chiming sounds as you collect things, firing slow moving energy bolts from the rather large bug attached to your arm, and spreading the love as you pop the horrible scab plants to bring new life to the world. I then start to notice that jumping through the air on pickups brings aerial bonuses, popping multiple scab plants starts chains with extra points, clearing all of a certain thing brings another bonus, points are flying in from all angles before you know it and what was at the start a rather therapeutic experience quickly becomes a battle with the clock trying to squeeze out every last point you can.

Xotic quickly becomes intense and insanely fun, and its clear why they dubbed it an Arcade shooter, this is fast, instant fun, at its best

The glorious moment comes when you've rid the world of all the scabs, collected all you can find, defeated anything in your way, and a portal opens, allowing you to leave the world in good time and move on to your next cleansing, at which point, you get graded on your performance, and placed into a global leaderboard for that particular level. Now the OCD kicks in...what if I hit that and then that? Or picked up that first then this? And what if I went that way around instead of....you get the idea.

What WXP Games have done is create a wonderfully simple concept and made it insanely but casually competitive. I guarantee if you play this game you will want to get better, you will want to beat that time when you see you were 1 second behind, you will want that one thing you missed in your last run, it's fun and addictive, but quick and painless too, with most worlds only lasting 5 minutes or so, allowing you to easily jump in at any point in your day.

On top of that, they've taken things a step further. Not only do they have the leaderboards in place, your character also progresses through a series of upgrades you can administer at the end of each level. With both weapon and character upgrades available, its up to you to pick what you see as best as you work your way through the game, and maybe after a certain upgrade you may feel that on such and such a level you could have done something a little better, so you go back, and the OCD kicks in again...

Now for all this to happen and gel, the control method clearly has to be solid, and while it's what you expect in most cases, it takes a little getting used to, and use of your brain. Gravity isn't quite what you would expect it to be, but you're visiting various worlds after all, so the floaty sensation you often get when jumping around does make sense in that respect. The general response from an FPS perspective is great, and the engine runs well, no matter how much is happening on screen, and this is on a mid level system at best. Then additionally, to add to the movement options, you have something called Hard Shields. In essence they are deployable temporary platforms, allowing you to drop and then traverse to further places, opening up a whole new set of options in how to navigate the worlds.

It's all these options that really make Xotic quite special in my eyes, there's no way two people would ever play a level the same way, there's no way they would ever collect everything in the same order or take the same shots to make chains happen, the amount of combinations and possibilities here are mind blowing, and in today's market of overly scripted, generic shooters, Xotic for me is a very welcome addition and a breath of fresh air.

Indie developers really are coming out of the woodwork with some interesting and strong titles recently, and Xotic, weighing in at just £5.99 on Steam, is an incredible title and must buy, even if it's just to show love for what these small teams are trying to accomplish.