[b]Xeno Runners set out to create a unique racing experience, and on paper it achieved it. However, it still has some rough edges holding it back from greatness.[/b]
Aesthetically it looks great, alien enough in both the suits and landscapes that it's a pleasure to zip around at Mach 10, and with the recently added music it serves the pace well. There's a decent mix of high-energy trance and metal, along with the usual assortment of adrenaline thumping beats.
Each track has a series of rings you have to fly through in order to finish the run. Going through each ring 'resets' your heat level which always builds up, and skipping a ring can cause you to overheat which ends your attempt, crucial for shaving off seconds though. But it's hitting these rings perfectly (dead centre) that is both challenging and frustrating. As you have to perfectly clear each ring in order to stack the maximum speed multiplier bonus possible to achieve the time required to get 3 stars. What makes this hard?
Ironically, Xeno Runners falls short in the graphics department, or specifically, that you're stuck with global pre-sets of 'low/med/high' where each one looks worse than the other. As you can't disable motion blur or depth of field, there's no anti-aliasing and you can't change the resolution, so things look blurry. There are also particle effects everywhere - on the character, the rings you pass, the air you zip through, so things look grainy.
Next, the FOV moves further and further away as you increase in speed, meaning hitting a 2D ring in 3-dimensional space akin to navigating a visual soup with a character you are viewing from far behind that happens to also block your view of where you're going... you get the idea.
Despite that, along the way you get quips of encouragement such as "You can do it" and "Keep going" each time you nosedive a wall - great way to motivate, but I don't appreciate it telling me "clear sign of incompetence" other times. This just feels tone deaf given all of the game's own shortcomings. Plus, do you want people to play your game or drive them away?
Instead, you could allow us to get back into the action faster. A quick restart shortcut would go a long way such allowing us to press "r" mid-race to restart back to the start. Needing to explode, or hitting menu > restart race, then reorienting yourself to face the ideal starting angle is unnecessarily slow each time.
[i]You'd think given the above I'd give it a negative review, and I was tempted, however the game is fun. Once you get on a role of re-running a course to shave of microseconds to beat your own time and get on the leader board - it's really rewarding because you can feel yourself improving. So for that alone, Xeno Runners plays great for the most part, it's just held back by the inability to finetune the game's visuals.[/i]
