Wandering around in a fixed perspective isometric environment with a barely visible character isn’t fun at the best of times but it’s almost like the devs went out of their way to throw shade on anyone who wanted to play the game. You’re going to have to start with the assumption that if you want to play Xel you’re going to have eyestrain. The camera is ridiculously far away in Xel and it leads to a remarkable number of gameplay issues. Most enemies are tiny blobs on screen and the only way to tell they were robots in the beginning is that part of the story specifically alluded to the robots Reid had just been fighting. Reid is so small on the screen that on a 55” TV, you can barely see your character or any of the enemies for that matter. In fact to start with, what it has is a terrible presentation style. Now, all that would work with the right plot and careful attention to detail but Xel doesn’t have that. And you’re fighting robots with a weird energy sword and shield on a space ship. The rock stuck in your forehead lets you slip through cracks in time to solve environmental puzzles and only works when it’s necessary. You’re stuck on some sort of dying space arc taken over by weird robots and odd plants. Realism isn’t really a thing in Xel though, so don’t sweat it. Suddenly you’re Reid instead of ‘?’ and other characters whose names you’ve already learned are ‘?’. The game even lists her name as question marks…until it doesn’t. The literal worst plot device in gaming makes another return. Sure, you know that Reid is looking to help out, she’s shipwrecked, and she’s got amnesia. Xel is kind of weird like that…there’s really not a lot of depth in any given portion of the story. Your ship crashes and you’ve got to figure out what’s going on. There’s not a lot of preamble here either. It treats players to the exploits of Reid, a young woman who’s been shipwrecked on what appears to be an alien planet. Xel comes to us from German developer Tiny Roar and publisher Assemble Entertainment. Dropping to essentially no fanfare, this top-down sci-fi adventure should have at least caught the radar of gamers, but it didn’t. The vast crush of indie sci-fi that’s been pummeling gamers lately means that title after title slip through the cracks of the collective gaming consciousness and that’s certainly the case for Xel. If you’re not aware of Xel, you’re not alone.
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