Science Fiction is Hard – Xel Review

If you’re not aware of Xel, you’re not alone.  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.  Dropping to essentially no fanfare, this top-down sci-fi adventure should have at least caught the radar of gamers, but it didn’t.

Xel comes to us from German developer Tiny Roar and publisher Assemble Entertainment.  It treats players to the exploits of Reid, a young woman who’s been shipwrecked on what appears to be an alien planet.  There’s not a lot of preamble here either.  Your ship crashes and you’ve got to figure out what’s going on.  Xel is kind of weird like that…there’s really not a lot of depth in any given portion of the story.  Sure, you know that Reid is looking to help out, she’s shipwrecked, and she’s got amnesia.  Wait.  Amnesia?  Yeah, you read that right.  The literal worst plot device in gaming makes another return.

So Reid has amnesia. The game even lists her name as question marks…until it doesn’t.  Suddenly you’re Reid instead of ‘???’ and other characters whose names you’ve already learned are ‘???’.  You know, because that’s realistic.  Realism isn’t really a thing in Xel though, so don’t sweat it.  You’re stuck on some sort of dying space arc taken over by weird robots and odd plants.  The rock stuck in your forehead lets you slip through cracks in time to solve environmental puzzles and only works when it’s necessary.  And you’re fighting robots with a weird energy sword and shield on a space ship.  Riiiiiight.

Now, all that would work with the right plot and careful attention to detail but Xel doesn’t have that.  In fact to start with, what it has is a terrible presentation style.  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.  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.  The camera is ridiculously far away in Xel and it leads to a remarkable number of gameplay issues.

You’re going to have to start with the assumption that if you want to play Xel you’re going to have eyestrain. There’s no zoom either.  You just have to deal.  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.  Try to break some boxes to collect items (you’ll need them to craft in the town) and weird giant mushrooms or bad angles block the view of what you’re picking up.  Oh, and they block enemies too.  If only there was a way to program movable cameras with zoom functions in 2022…

But Xel has other things that are more irritating.  Once you start playing the game in earnest, you’ll find that the framerate is offensively bad on the Switch.  There’s massive pop-up, frame skipping, and even straight-up lag in low impact environments with almost no enemies.  You can literally become stuck in the backgrounds and the pathways you need to follow aren’t always clear, leading you to repeatedly get stuck in the environment.  Fun.  Sure, you’ve got some nifty upgrades and the background design is pretty but being forced to reboot the game repeatedly isn’t fun.  And if you do, sometimes it corrupts your save and you might have to start over.  Yay!

And then there’s the game design itself.  Xel feels like it’s 20 years old at best and you’re literally just solving the simplest of environmental puzzles that take less time to figure out than they do to actually apply the solutions too.  You’re just waiting for the next section of the game constantly, hoping that it’ll be more engaging than the last because the combat is unsatisfying and the story really isn’t picking up.

Oddly, the cinema sequences are quite good in Xel.  They look fairly advanced and it’s obvious that the cinemas were a labor of love.  But the game design negates any work that’s been done, regardless of the well-done voiceovers or the solid art design.  There’s potential here but it’s entirely lost by the game itself.  Xel is simply the antithesis of fun.  By the time you manage to get the spider boss, you’ll likely have lost any patience or tolerance you had for the game and just be done with it.  And after that?  During this review, after beating the spider boss and returning to the needle, the game literally failed to load and walking down the pathway led to falling off the edge of the world and instant death in a weird blue screen…and this happened THREE times before the game glitched and loaded properly.  Oh, and any time you walk past a previous point that’s set to trigger a story element, the game replays that story element, even if if was passed quite some time ago.  Sure, a patch is coming but this is ridiculous.

It’s always a shame to have to give such a vehemently negative impression of a game but Xel legitimately earns every snide remark.  This is a game that’s just unpleasant in every way, from the eye-strainingly tiny characters which get lost in the environment to the ridiculously bad optimization on the Switch leading to significant gameplay problems.   Now at this point, it’s important to note that the devs have a slate of patches coming for Xel that are expected to theoretically fix a lot of the problems.  It’s a damn big list too.  But it’s also important to note that Xel is an indie title, a new IP, and it released worldwide on July 14^th.  This is a case of a game that’s essentially an early access beta being pushed out early in order to capitalize.  Why?  No idea.  Maybe the dev process was too long and they needed the income?  Regardless, the fact of the matter is that Xel should not have been released in this state.

It would be great to tell you that despite its shortcomings, Xel is delightful to play and Reid is an interesting protagonist but that’s simply not the case in any way shape or form.  This is a $19 game that’s not fun, is unfinished, and runs like crap on the Switch.  The plot is thin and unengaging and there are no real redeeming qualities to the game.  This is the sort of shovelware that kills indie gaming for mainstream gamers and pushes them increasingly towards a handful of over-budget AAA content that’s almost as bad.  But even a bad AAA game is better than Xel.  There’s simply no redemption here and this is a game that’s better off avoided, even when it inevitably hits deep discount on the Switch eShop.  Considering how awesome sci-fi stories can be, that’s just sad.

This review is based on a digital copy of Xel provided by the publisher.  It was played on a Nintendo Switch and played equally poorly both docked and undocked.  Xel  is also available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC on Steam.