Xotic, available from the XBLA Market place is a FPS game of sorts. It’s got your average evil darkness of evil that wants to take over everything. You happen to be the chosen one and must stop said evil and hopefully banish it for good.

Whilst this game has some interesting ideas (Your gun is a symbiotic fly) it really just failed to do anything for me. The graphics are pretty average and in a word ‘neon’, everything seems to emit more bloom than a Halo gun. The artistic direction looks too stylised and comes across as primitive and lacking polish. The hand full of maps I managed to play were small and seemed to be overly forcing the game mechanics. I understand the maps get more complex as the game progresses but frankly my eyes were getting tired of the glaring colours and trying to distinguish bad guys from back ground after the first few levels.

My biggest grief is that trying to find neon lights in a neon lit environment is a bit of an eye strain, in order to find all the lights and secrets you need to navigate the map in 3 dimensions which might have been a challenge it wasn’t for the power of creating platforms under your feet. The difficulty curve is a little wonky and by the 4th level I was facing opponents who could kill me in a couple hits which might have been because I didn’t know a good path for upgrading my skills.

The aim of Xotic is to blast through the levels and gun for the highest score, the story provides little more than a just because and since leader boards haven’t interested me since Pac Man it’s more of a method to get a few extra game score.

Xotic seems like it wants to be a platform game with exploring and scoring elements disguised as an fps. But it tends to just end up being a bit of an eye strain and stopped being fun. If you dropped the symbiotic part and let me play as a fly I would likely have enjoyed it more. If you’re a competitive player and love getting high scores you will likely enjoy this more than me if you prefer getting a Kill Death Ratio, look elsewhere.

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Xotic, available from the XBLA Market place is a FPS game of sorts. It’s got your average evil darkness of evil that wants to take over everything. You happen to be the chosen one and must stop said evil and hopefully banish it for good.

Whilst this game has some interesting ideas (Your gun is a symbiotic fly) it really just failed to do anything for me. The graphics are pretty average and in a word ‘neon’, everything seems to emit more bloom than a Halo gun. The artistic direction looks too stylised and comes across as primitive and lacking polish. The hand full of maps I managed to play were small and seemed to be overly forcing the game mechanics. I understand the maps get more complex as the game progresses but frankly my eyes were getting tired of the glaring colours and trying to distinguish bad guys from back ground after the first few levels.

My biggest grief is that trying to find neon lights in a neon lit environment is a bit of an eye strain, in order to find all the lights and secrets you need to navigate the map in 3 dimensions which might have been a challenge it wasn’t for the power of creating platforms under your feet. The difficulty curve is a little wonky and by the 4th level I was facing opponents who could kill me in a couple hits which might have been because I didn’t know a good path for upgrading my skills.

The aim of Xotic is to blast through the levels and gun for the highest score, the story provides little more than a just because and since leader boards haven’t interested me since Pac Man it’s more of a method to get a few extra game score.

Xotic seems like it wants to be a platform game with exploring and scoring elements disguised as an fps. But it tends to just end up being a bit of an eye strain and stopped being fun. If you dropped the symbiotic part and let me play as a fly I would likely have enjoyed it more. If you’re a competitive player and love getting high scores you will likely enjoy this more than me if you prefer getting a Kill Death Ratio, look elsewhere.