WXP Games set out to make something different with Xotic (pronounced ‘Exotic’, just to throw you off). In an industry packed to the gills with cinematic shooters where Manly McSquarejaw slays a thousand nondescript terrorists, it takes some nerve to make a neon-coloured score-attack platform FPS where you play as a photosynthetic gremlin wielding a giant mutant dragonfly. It’s definitely creative – but is it fun?

Right off the bat, this game throws a couple of audio-visual curveballs your way. First, the vocoder-altered narrator (who provides you with a few lines of nonsensical opening spiel – something about a lonely thought-orb that went mad and eats planets now – and comments on almost every scoring action performed) sounds a lot like Soundwave from Transformers, giving everything a vaguely sing-song intonation. Secondly, this game is colorful. Ever wonder where all the brightly neon-lit environments of late 90s/early 2000s shooters went? Well, this game seems to have been hoarding them. Everything seems to be glowing some neon primary color, with the exception of the environments, which merely bathe in and reflect the luminous mcguffins spread generously around the arenas. Everything is very self-consciously alien, too. The red dots on the walls aren’t just targets to be shot – they’re ‘scab plants’, which explode to be replaced by a variety of strange green flora, which in turn spawn stranger, floating plants which are actually timed powerups.

It’s refreshingly vibrant and alien to look at, but the nature of the game – a tightly wound score-attack shooter – doesn’t quite gel with the pointedly surreal aesthetic. Until you’ve been playing for quite some time, those powerup plants are hard to distinguish from one another, and floating enemy turrets appear as glowing red blobs almost identical to harmless point targets until they start shooting slow-moving glowing red blobs at you, wheras metallic, mounted turrets blend almost completely into the backdrop, drowned out by the visual noise all around – you’ll be lucky to notice them before they chewed off half your health sometimes. Enemies (outside of stationary emplacements) are a variety of misshapen grey humanoids that animate oddly and don’t seem to fit in with the aesthetic either. Despite being the most threatening thing in the game, they’re sometimes very difficult to pick out from the background, and don’t seem to react at all to being shot until you completely deplete their health, causing them to spontaneously vanish in a puff of particles, quite unlike the more passive targets which tend to explode with a satisfying sound and some spectacular fireworks when shot.

That really does sum up the game as a whole. It’s a strange and disparate grab-bag of potentially clever elements that never quite seem to gel. As mentioned, the game is a score-attack shooter, set over about 23 small levels (many of them just 3-4 rooms long, completed in 2-4 minutes). Usually, your goal is to clear out all the enemies and reach the exit that appears afterwards, although some levels are just exercises in scoring as high as you can before a time limit runs out, all to compete on the leaderboards against friends or the general public. There’s a fairly detailed scoring system underpinning the whole experience, and ideal play involves keeping up a steady chain of background targets shot, while killing all enemies while jumping (and in clusters if possible) while collecting all the floating point items in bunches while airborne. It’s fairly compelling stuff, until you realise that you just landed in front of an enemy that mulches you in a second while you pound ammo into its face, achieving nothing of note.

The weapons (or rather, the various fire-modes of your transforming dragonfly-turned-rifle) also seem to be a mixed bag of nice ideas and poor implementation. While you don’t gain access to your full armory until about half-way through the game (each level awards experience points, which are used to unlock new stat perks and weapons), I never found much reason to use anything but the infinite-ammo peashooter as my primary fire, and the electric tazer mode as my secondary, allowing me to stun enemies and beat them up freely without fear of reprisal. The main issue with the weapons is that they all draw upon the same shared ammo bar, but most of the forms drain far too much to be useful. The rocket-launcher-like mode (which spawns and fires smaller bugs which explode) drains massive amounts of power, but many basic enemies takes two direct hits from it to kill, often making it faster and more efficient just to use the basic ‘pistol’ which rattles off shots as fast as you can click. There’s a lot of redundancy in the 8 (four primary, four secondary) weapons, and none of them seem to have any real power or ‘oomph’ behind them, especially considering how enemies don’t respond at all to being shot. An FPS where the shooting isn’t fun or satisfying is committing a cardinal sin.

Redundancy seems to apply to the controls as well. Most the time, all you’ll need are your basic movement keys, aiming, jump, your fire buttons and the ‘hard hologram’ button. The last of those either deploys instant, transparent cover from enemy fire in front of you (although you can’t shoot out through it, rendering it mostly useless), or directly underneath you if you’re mid-jump effectively letting you jump infinitely on an endless stream of free platforms until you hit the often-too-low invisible barriers above and around all the outdoors arenas. Why, then, are there lean keys? And even multiple variants on them, including a pop-up-from-cover system and supposedly context-sensitive leaning that I could never quite get to work. There’s no reason to poke your head around cover when you can just strafe around it at full speed and achieve the same effect, especially considering that the clock is ticking and deducting points from your end total. Maybe I’m missing the point, but I felt like the Hard Holograms could have just as easily been replaced by a basic double-jump ability and some pre-placed platforms, rather than having an over-too-soon triple-jump powerup and a series of collectible hologram upgrades that let you place more simultaneous barriers/platforms, which don’t help the slightest as you’re only ever concerned about the one you’re currently standing on.

And to top it all off, the PC version (which I’m reviewing here) seems to have a few issues of its own. First off was a horrible audio bug that forced me to switch to stereo and forsake my beloved 5.1 speaker setup, otherwise I’d only hear this constant loud thrumming noise. More importantly, the PC video options menu contains a brightness slider and nothing else. Not even a way to change the resolution – the game defaults to your desktop resolution and offers no freedom from there. Bizarrely, the actual in-game graphics are simultaneously slightly blurry (feeling like it’s perhaps a 720p image upscaled to my monitors native res) and heavily aliased. The game at least lets you rebind your controls fully and utilizes Steamworks well to handle scoreboards and progress saving, although I chuckled at the misplaced reference to Gamertags in the PC version score screen. The PC version has no playability issues, and runs well, but it feels like it was a bit of an afterthought in some respects.

In the end, Xotic feels like it’s drowning in concepts and visual creativity. There’s enough ideas here to build two or three full-length games on, but instead they’ve crammed every single idea possible into a low-budget downloadable arcade shooter. There’s a potentially addictive and well-paced arcade challenge to be found here, but I could never shake the feel that the game is just carrying around too much baggage to make it really work right. If only the presentation was as well engineered as the scoring system, I could see myself coming back to this one, but with the completion of the final level, I felt no real incentive to go back and improve on earlier performances. Hopefully, WXP still do – they’ve got talent and inspiration for sure, but perhaps overstretched their means this time round.

Xotic is available for PC via Steam for $10 or your regional equivalent, and will be available soon for Xbox 360 via XBLA for 800 MSPoints.