Xeodrifter

This is one of a handful of games that I had never heard of before I bought it. I was just poking through the Switch online store, thought it looked kinda cool, and bought it!

Turns out it is kinda cool! If it were any longer, it would probably get to be a bit of a slog. If it were any shorter, I’d probably have felt cheated out of ten bucks. As it is, this is a two to three hour Metroidvania that takes a few interesting ideas and expands on them about as much as possible in its short playtime. Short, simple, sweet, and fun.

The game begins simply enough – your spaceship’s hyperspace drive or whatever breaks down and you are stranded in a system of four planets. You need to find some kind of crystal to replace the one that’s broken. And that’s it, that’s all you get for story. There’s nothing more – no item descriptions, or text, or names, or anything. This is fine by me – anymore story would be unnecessary padding – but your mileage may vary.

Xeodrifter leans almost completely into the “Metroid” half of the term “Metroidvania”. You can customize your weapon, but otherwise there are no RPG elements to be found here. Weapon customization turned out to be one of the best parts of this game. There are two pickups you can get that improve your character – health and gun parts. There are several different kinds of bullets your gun can fire and if you put half of your gun parts into one type and half into another, you’ll get a combination of those types. Some experimentation can reward you with some varied combinations! For instance, I spent a lot of time combining the rapid-fire bullet type with one that makes the bullet wave up and down.

No Metroidvania would be worth its salt without fun new abilities to find and utilize along the way and Xeodrifter is no exception. The first thing you’ll find is a tiny one-spacefarer submarine for exploring all those underwater sections you kept coming across before. Later on, you’ll come across boots that let you run across hot liquids, a jetpack, and more. Best of all, you’ll come across an item that lets you phase between the background and foreground. If one mechanic could have been expanded upon, it’s this one, but what we have in this game is used cleverly and satisfyingly enough.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that Xeodrifter is without its problems. Movement is a little clunky at first – your character feels a little like 2D Sonic in that he takes a little while to get to full movement speed. Getting used to this doesn’t take all that long and once you do, it’s a non-issue, but it takes just a little too long to get there. Other than that, the game also features one boss used repeatedly, rather than a rogue’s gallery of well-designed foes. Which is a real shame, because there are some regular enemies that could have been beefed-up and given some new powers and they would make for fine bosses. As it stands, the boss this game has starts out with a small move-set and every time you face it, it adds something to trip you up. This is fine, I guess, and it means that the final boss actually does test every last thing you’ve learned about the game, but some of the moves this thing uses in later fights are annoying. Not unfair or anything, just not fun to fight.

Xeodrifter is a good bite-sized game, if you’re looking for a short game of this type and don’t think ten US bucks is too much for three hours of Metroidvania fun.