Xeodrifter from Atooi, the same company (guy) who developed Mutant Mudds, Chicken Wiggle, and Totes the Goat, is the brainchild behind this wonderful Metroid-esque game (I guess you could say Metroidvania, except that this game is already pulls more from Metroid than it does from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which took a lot from Super Metroid, but anyway) that has been released on the 3DS, Wii U, and recently, the Nintendo Switch. I picked it up during their most recent sale for and very happy about everything about this game.
Except the frustration I felt when I realized, after defeating one of the bosses, that checkpoints do not function the same as saving your game when you turn the system off. Thankfully by that point, I had managed a pretty decent system of killing these bastards off.
Something that may not be talked about too often, is that even though Xeodrifter is pretty light on story, that does not mean that it takes anything away from the game. You play as an unnamed, un-gendered astronaut whose ship breaks down and you have to scour four planets in a small system for the part that will fix your ship. That is basically it. There is no further explanation as to the planets, why the inhabitants are as hostile as they are, or why you're gung-ho in killing everything you come across. And honestly, it was kind of refreshing not to have to worry about if I was missing some deeper, hidden meaning somewhere. You have your goal, and you go for it.
So almost right off the bat, as you enter one of the four stages, it is pretty obvious that Xeodrifter was designed with the 3DS in mind, using the similar background and foreground jumping mechanic that was used in Mutant Mudds. However, not having a 3D effect when you jump back and forth between screens in no way deterred from my enjoyment of the game. There were a few times when you had to jump to the background area and your vision was partially obscured by creatures or terrain in the foreground, but it was never so bad that it felt like Mr. Watsham was being unfair in his level design.
Easily my favorite feature of Xeodrifter was the weapon customization. Throughout the game, you find nodes that you use to modify your gun, and here is where it gets wacky so try to keep up. You have five different types of ways your weapon fires. From a larger shot that increases damage, to increasing your rate of fire (in two different ways mind you!), to a scatter shot (which I didn't really explore too much), to a wave beam type shot. Each type of shot has up to five slots for the nodes which increases its prevalence in your shot. In the above screenshot, I have one node each in damage, rate of fire, and wave beam; although looking at this now, I think that the damage beam requires two nodes to actually have any effect, but oh well. Then, you are able to have not just one, but three different weapon loadouts. And at anytime during the game, you can change the layout of any of the loadouts, so you are never stuck with a weapon customization that you are not happy with. By the end of the game, I had my exploration loadout, boss loadout, and random silly/experimental loadout. The other great thing, or at least I thought so, was that there was only minor explanation as to how to use this screen and modify your weapons, unless it went into detail in the digital manual that I have not bothered to look at (if it even exists).
I feel like I should also mention the music, because it fit the visual aesthetic perfectly. I cannot be sure, but the sounded a lot like SNES era music, but had a lot of NES-ness about it, especially the title theme which reminded me a lot of the music from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There was also a lot of similarities to Hirokazu Tanaka's music from the original Metroid, which is always a good thing. Re-listening to the soundtrack, some tracks stick out more than others, but all-in-all, it is a perfectly composed soundtrack for what the game is.
In the end, I spent around four hours playing through Xeodrifter, and I felt that that was a perfect amount of time with this game. I did not find/acquire all of the health nodes, but I did have all of the weapon nodes; so I guess you could say that I did not 100% the game. Could it have been a few hours more? Sure, but it did not need to be, and maybe a few more hours might have made the game less fun. However, I would be very excited if Atooi began development on a Xeodrifter 2 in the future, and I might even pay retail for the game (I blame Steam for my penchant for only buying games on sale these days).
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
P.S. I just wanted to add, which I do not feel is a spoiler, that at the end of the game after the credits, there was something that I grew up seeing a lot of in NES games, but feel like I have not seen in a long time. A "thank you" from the developer. It just gave me a warm feeling, deep down in the cockles to see something that I apparently had unconsciously attached meaning to.
And thank you Jools Watsham for creating a fun game.
