I wouldn’t say that it’s rare for an Xbox Live Indie Game to instantly irritate me – I’ve played plenty of pretty awful titles downloaded from the XBLIG service, and a fair few of them had me baffled from the very beginning, with terrible explanation screens and slow-paced action.

Fear the Dronx is guilty of both in a very serious way. From the moment you start playing, the game tries to teach the fundamentals in the most drawn-out and tedious manner possible, and once you finally get into the game itself, the action turns out to be pretty sodding boring too. There’s very little to like about Fear the Dronx, not because it’s a poorly made game, bur rather that the concept is dull dull dull.

GAMEPLAY

The idea on each level is to trap the Dronx then blow them up. Blocks and bombs are spurting out of spawners on different parts of the level, and you use a mixture of arrows and blockers to direct the blocks, trapping the Dronx in corners or against walls, then move a bomb into the path of the block and blow the lot up.

In all honesty, I felt bored just explaining that. It’s an incredibly tedious idea, and in practice it turns out to be even worse. Moving blocks and bombs around isn’t much fun, and planning your attack by holding blocks and bombs in place with blockers is very dull too.

The most ridiculous part is that both the blocks and the bombs start shooting out straight away, not giving you any time to think about the best plan of action. There are limited of each, hence using each to its full potential is key. You can, however, ignore everything on your first try, work out how best to play the level, then simply restart it. Why is there is no ‘start the level’ option before the action begins?

Fortunately, there are barely any levels to play through. Over three difficulties, you’ve got just under 20 levels to yawn your way through, but you most likely won’t make it past 5 of them before you turn the game off. There are other ‘interesting’ ideas and elements thrown in with later levels, but the underlying concept always remains the same, hence you won’t care about the rest of the game anyway!

STYLE

Fear the Dronx doesn’t look too bad – the Dronx themselves reminded me a little of the aliens in Puppy Games’ Revenge of the Titans, and the explosions look pretty neat.

The backdrops, however, are incredibly boring, and every level looks pretty much the same. It really can’t have taken the developers very long to create Fear the Dronx – every level uses the same set of blocks, but in different positions. It feels very cheap indeed.

The music falls in the usual Xbox Live Indie Games techno-crap category. Music is far more important than you seem to believe, XBLIG devs! Give us something worth listening to, else we’re definitely not going to enjoy your game!

STORY

The Xbox Live Marketplace description for the game states that you need to ‘snare and destroy the evil Dronx mastermind’, although this isn’t mentioned anywhere in the actual game. The description does also state, however, that Fear the Dronx is ‘a fresh and innovative take on the puzzle genre’, so we can’t really take it’s word as gospel now, can we?

OTHER

Fear the Dronx is part tedium, part irritation, and a huge dose of bad idea. The game had us wanting to quit and never boot it up again within minutes, and a little while later we were rocking back and forth, not-so-jokily wishing the end of the world would come.

If you have read all this and come to the conclusion that you would still like to try the demo out, you can of course do so. You’re also mentally unstable, and should probably seek help. Good day to you!

BUY/TRY