Xyanide (Xbox)

There are some genres that just work better in 2D, and shoot ’em ups certainly seem like one of them. This doesn’t mean a game that tries to tackle the genre in 3D is automatically bad, it’s just the normal formula followed is one that works better with only one plane to manage. Weaving a single ship or character through waves of enemies and their weapon fire is much easier when you only have to worry about moving horizontally and vertically, with the third dimension making it much harder to fill space with enemies and character movement can be difficult to restrict while remaining satisfying. Xyanide decides to move into the 3D plane in half measures, keeping the game’s movement on the 2D plane but moving the action into the background as well.

 

In Xyanide, your forward movement through the 3D environments is handled by the game, but you can still move your spacecraft up and down as well as left and right. In essence, you are restricted to a 2D plane still, but your enemies are not. The foes you need to shoot down will fly in from the background or even never leave it, the player also controlling an aiming reticle they can aim anywhere they like on screen. Since enemies can move both in the background and in the same area as you, your reticle will switch from targeting things in the background and enemies in the foreground based on where you are pointing it, and this is a mostly effective system. There is an issue where certain background objects only become available targets when they are close enough or on the right part of the screen, but this also means they won’t hurt you until you can hurt them at least. When both areas are populated it can really become an issue though, such as trying to hit an enemy near you only to have your shots head off towards some target in 3D space instead. It is an inevitable issue, especially during boss battles where the game likes to mix its large background bosses with plenty of foreground baddies, but more often than not, the targeting troubles here are an annoyance rather than a death sentence. It definitely shows that the concept is flawed though, the player unable to rely on their main form of attack in a game where the entire focus is on shooting down enemies.

The central gimmick of Xyanide is a bit of a wash, but there is another element to the shooting that had much more potential. The player packs two modes of basic fire associated with their space craft’s biomechanical nature, each one having its own advantage. The more powerful mechanical form shot is meant to deal with the beefier foes, able to chew through the large health bars of bosses and big enemies. If there are multiple small targets though, your rapid organic form shot is made to deal with crowds more effectively. There is nothing preventing you from using the wrong shot type as both will still damage targets, but the speed of killing baddies is greatly increased if you are using the appropriate weapon for the situation, the balance still an obvious factor to consider when upgrading your weapon types. Defeating certain enemies in Xyanide will cause them to drop mutation upgrades, the player able to grab them to increase the power of their current shot type. Both will always get minor boosts, but even if you choose to invest the greater bonus into one weapon specifically, it never really feels like it can fully replace the other, meaning that playing through Xyanide effectively will require active weapon swapping that makes enemy encounters more than just aiming right. As you mutate, so too do some special abilities you can use for temporary effects. There’s an entire table in the manual explaining the many different ways these special abilities can manifest, but even though they take on new aspects and become more effective the more a weapon form is upgraded, the four special abilities you pack always revolve around either dealing damage, escaping enemies, shielding your craft, or influencing enemy behavior. On top of all this, you also pack an option to fire homing rockets, but your main lasers can almost be too effective at times, the lock-on rockets and specials helpful but more situational options than a constant presence during play.

 

The weapon swapping and upgrading mechanic could have made for an involved and enjoyable shoot ’em up, but even ignoring the troubles with trying to swap shots between the foreground and background with no easy method of controlling it, there’s a more damning design decision and one that isn’t even an attempt to explore a new concept. Xyanide’s most pressing flaw is its boring enemies. Xyanide only has a few stages to its gameplay, but these stages are stretched out and bogged down by a lack of variety. The first issue is that most enemies you encounter are pretty much just grey spaceships. Even when they are designed differently, their behavior is pretty similar. Enemies will fly towards the player, usually starting in the background to give the player a chance to start shooting them before they enter the same plane as your spacecraft. Here, their bodies are dangerous to touch and they usually start firing their weapons, and while different ships can sometimes have different shot types, most of them are so generic the differences between them are barely noticeable. Even if you can’t deal with enemies in a timely manner by using the right shot types, they will eventually leave the screen, meaning that the pressure is alleviated a bit too often. On top of all of this, your craft even has a health bar that can take a few shots. Contact with an enemy will be an instant death and the game can remain difficult thanks to this, but before the first level is over, these hazards are already so commonplace that retreading them in the following levels doesn’t shift the dynamic around often enough to keep the battles fresh.

There are technically two themes the enemy forces can fit under, these being an appropriate mirror to your ship’s biomechanical design. More mechanical ships make up the bulk of your opposition, but later on you will encounter organic foes who… actually fight pretty similarly to the mechanical forces. Their larger enemies do stand out more since they require more accurate shots and use stingray designs instead of just making the regular spaceships larger, but even though they’re a much smaller presence, they become rote in the span of their levels too. These enemies could work though for something shorter, but overexposure is what really wears down their designs and makes them feel unexciting. Perhaps more than anything, the level design is what leads to Xyanide’s play issues. Enemies come in such small waves with too much time between them, the game even taking many breaks where there are no enemies on screen and you’re just flying forward unopposed. Most of the environments you move through are also just long corridors of metal, and when you do head to an asteroid later on, its interior is just more naturalistic corridors of rock. The world blends together quickly and gives you little to work with during downtime, but the game does try to add in branching paths for the sake of replayability. Sadly, these paths don’t really feel different either, the game technically throwing different enemies and environments at you depending on which you picked but the sameness of them making neither choice more interesting.

 

Xyanide likely thinks its bland and repetitive design is justified by its plot though, but viewing the opening cutscene it might seem hard to imagine why that is. A surprising amount of resources were put into the game’s opening to make it seem grand and rooted in a truly alien culture. The planet Mardar exists close to an enormous black hole, and so, the Judges of Mardar have deemed it a holy tool of justice used to execute the worst criminals the galaxy has ever seen. Surprisingly, what looks like a young human girl is brought before the judges, but this is Aguira, a witch responsible for world-ending atrocities. As the ship carrying her departs for the execution by black hole, an asteroid strikes it, a substance known as Xyanide piercing Aguira and giving her the incredible power to manifest her thoughts. As one of the escorts for the execution you must now fly through the constructs of her mind that have taken shape within the damaged ship and asteroid, but unfortunately, Aguira must be incredibly unimaginative. The ship and asteroid interiors don’t feel greatly impacted by this nor do the enemies really seem to be directly born from such a concept, your opposition mostly just boring but logical aliens or spacecraft befitting the area. Even the bosses mostly take the form of machine systems that, while making for distinctly different designs that are fought in appreciably different ways, still feel uninspired. Minibosses also crop up during levels and can be described in a similar manner, these often taking the shape of a large spacecraft that has a recognizably different shape and approach to being fought while still feeling like an extension of the game’s overall generic aesthetic.

THE VERDICT: It could be easy to identify Xyanide’s problem as its imprecise implementation of shooting in 3D while moving in 2D, your shots often heading between background and foreground in a less than reliable manner. However, proper level design or control over this could have salvaged the concept, but what Xyanide would still need to improve is its pacing. Enemy waves come in small amounts even on higher difficulties, it takes too long for new waves to appear, and most levels are long flights through bland metal tunnels that get interrupted by the same generic sets of enemies. Bosses and minibosses do break from the formula to make for better battles and the weapon system encourages active switches between heavy damage and rapid fire, meaning Xyanide could have kept things involved if the game hadn’t been structured in such a slow and unimaginative manner.

 

And so, I give Xyanide for Xbox…

A BAD rating. The mutation system and swapping from mechanical to organic could have made the shooting a blast. The shooting would require constant consideration and the player could personalize their ship to favor special abilities they like or make the shot style they prefer more powerful. Even with the issues with the game not detecting if you want to fire in the foreground or background, this approach to your basic fire and special options could have kept the game afloat, but the game really struggles to provide interesting targets for it. Even accepting that spaceships might be generic enemies, the areas are too slow to send them at you, have breaks where nothing interesting is on screen and there’s nothing to do, and the attempts to add replayability with branching paths fails since they barely feel different. Even battles with the impressive bosses and minibosses have these periods of inactivity injected into their design, meaning that even when you can find a rhythm or overcome the quirks of background targeting, things will soon force you into inactivity that kills the pace of the experience.

 

Xyanide’s experiment with introducing mild 3D elements into the shoot ’em up action is flawed, but there was the potential for something interesting there. Unfortunately, the basics were shoved aside to pursue these new ideas, with even good changes like the shot type swapping unable to find a good canvas. Enemy distribution and environmental design both failed in Xyanide, this shoot ’em up ending up as an action game with far too much inaction.