XYLITH - Hostile Planet

It's like they wanted this game to be a miserable experience. Because they sure did a great job of it. This game is ♥♥♥♥. Don't buy it. I might have only spent $1 for this game but it's those 2 hours I'll never get back. If you're interested in knowing why this game sucks, well, it sucks at ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ everything. The movement is seriously awful and clunky. There's no key mapping. There's absolutely no explanation for anything in the game so good luck finding out how something works. I ate 3 clips of ammo trying to figure crafting out. Yes, literally ate. The enemies are whack. You need to use like 4 clips just to kill one enemy and don't get me started on the bosses. And no, ammo isn't plentiful. You start out with like 10 clips then have to craft more, and in the entire 2 hours, I had the materials to craft like 3. The cursor is made just so that you lose track of it every ten seconds because it's tiny, and blends into the environment. The doorways between levels trigger at the slightest touch which would be fine if it asked for confirmation to warp but nooooooooo it immediately puts you into a loading screen that takes like 15 seconds. Then you have to go back through the doorway and wait another 15 seconds. There's ZERO settings options in game. Literally zero. Just a pause screen that shows you the unalterable hotkeys. The graphics are meh and shoddily pixelated. The soundtrack was forgettable; I don't even remember what it was like even though I was playing just 5 minutes ago. If the devs see this review by any chance, let me give you some constructive criticism. Get your ♥♥♥♥ together. Shame on you for trying to sell such an unfinished product. There are very basic features any decent game should have and you have marked off about zero of them. Go play an actually good game and learn something from it. This game has potential but you don't seem to care about it enough to draw out.

I had fun playing this game: Likes: Pets - Amazingly fun to collect. Sad when they die. High Score Table - Pretty nice recent addition. Challenging Bosses Dislikes I only found 1 out of the 7 Super Bosses - Prepare to spend a lot of time playing this to get the high level pets.

XYLITH - Hostile Planet is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro pixel platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This shovelware platformer is a somewhat cluttered Metroidvania/shooter with a para-science fiction theme (I think), plus grappling hooks and shooting and a consumable/inventory system... it's busy, to say the least. But throwing a lot of features into a game doesn't make it good (in fact it can detract from the experience when it's too convoluted). There's no tutorial either, so good luck if you want to work out all the obscure features in the game. It's also really, really clunky and unpolished, it doesn't look like any gameplay testing took place here. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics. The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers. The game features no proper level design or game/story flow/plot, as they opted to try to use samey repetitive procgen algorithms as a substitute for adding such content to the game, to avoid doing the important job of level/map design. As a result, the game doesn't actually have any content worth mentioning, just endless, boring, repetitive, soulless algorithmically generated sameyness. Developers must learn that procedural generation is not an acceptable substitute for content. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. XYLITH - Hostile Planet didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the game, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for going through the first door, and only around 40 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game, less than half the players. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the game. SteamDB shows the game only ever had two concurrent players, PEAK... a dismal failure to appeal to gamers. XYLITH - Hostile Planet is relatively cheap at $1 USD, but it's not worth it. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend.