Xentra Station

The game is more of a shooter than a platformer. You mostly move through corridors and hallways, and only rarely need to jump over obstacles, either with a basic jump or a rocket jump that gives you a bit of extra height to reach certain spots. You get to use a variety of weapons. Although a gamepad is supported, it is easier to aim with a mouse. Most weapons are different types of rifles or shotguns, with a few special options such as a flamethrower, so their main firing modes are simple to understand. Each weapon is assigned to a number key for quick access, and you can also scroll through them. The real differences come from their secondary fire modes, which can be helpful in the right situations. For example, your first gun shoots energy balls as its main fire and uses an energy grenade as its secondary fire, which can power up certain nodes. Some weapons use energy that recharges very slowly, while others use separate ammunition types for both firing modes. The problem is that you can only carry a limited amount of each, so if your inventory is full when you find more, you must leave it behind. You can start the game with the intro stage, but this is not recommended because it is extremely difficult and does not work well as a tutorial. The difficulty balance is poor. You choose the difficulty level at the start, but even on normal you will face old school difficulty that is too harsh for beginners, especially when you encounter spiders. The intro stage is also broken. If you die before reaching the first save station, you must restart the entire stage. When you do, you keep the gear you found earlier but start with no health, so a single bullet or a fall from too high will kill you instantly. Progress will also become impossible because at one point you need to recharge a battery that’s nowhere to be found. Skipping the intro stage becomes the only reasonable choice, but the downside is that you will not learn the basic mechanics, because that information is not repeated in the main game. The archive menu only explains weapons and some suit features, and does not cover core features. Progress in the main game is straightforward. You move through a stage, shoot enemies, and search for keycards that open the next door. Combat is mostly a matter of overpowering enemies because there is no dodge ability except jumping over bullets, which rarely works in narrow corridors. Health is only restored by picking up health packs that are used as soon as you collect them. Enemies sometimes drop ammunition, but health items are in limited supply. Sometimes the path splits, but the game remains linear because one route is always blocked until you destroy something or find a key. There is no map and no mission objectives, so you never know what your actions have changed. The game does include secrets. These are hidden behind walls that you can walk through or destroy, sometimes by using grenades. Some are located in hard to reach places that may require jumping over hazards. Most contain extra resources, but a few offer meaningful upgrades for your suit with more maximum health or improved ammunition capacity for your weapons. The game includes upgrade modules, yet their purpose is never made clear because you can't upgrade anything. Unfortunately, just like the intro stage, the game suffers from several broken triggers that cause stages to load incorrectly. This happened twice in the first half hour. Once it spawned me above the level at the very beginning, and later it happened again when returning to the ship after a short section outside. Both cases placed a checkpoint in the broken position, which does not help. The only solution is to load a much earlier save, which forces you to repeat large parts of the game, and even then you might run into the same problem again. Worse still, some issues make progress completely impossible. There is an invisible trigger that kills you instantly in what appears to be a normal part of the environment. There is also a section where the camera stops following you when you jump down, leaving you off screen and unable to continue. Between the broken triggers that look like AI coding problems and a price that is not very friendly for something this generic, I simply cannot recommend it.