Most combat takes place on the sandy overworld where enemies are generally visible and the player has the ability to choose to attack first. Story and graphics aren’t everything and Xeno certainly focuses more on combat and associated tank customization. While the enemy designs are fun, interesting, and colorful - such as hippopotamuses hiding cannons in their mouths or flamethrower-toting apes - they can’t save Xeno from being one of the worst-looking releases on the PlayStation 4. In addition, the occasionally required on-foot dungeons somehow manage to look worse, though low lighting is used in an attempt to mask the reuse of the same concrete rubble paths over and over again. Targeting the Vita as a platform is no excuse for having bland, uninteresting surroundings to drive across. Not even the simplistic design Xeno employs can cover up how bad the game looks.
This is obviously intended to evoke a similar emotion to the Statue of Liberty scene in Planet of the Apes, but instead it merely emphasizes the lack of other destroyed buildings that should be dotting the environment. The world is made up of corridors with rolling sand dunes very occasionally interrupted by decrepit, poorly rendered versions of Tokyo landmarks. It all combines to give the feeling that the narrative was never fully fleshed out, leaving dangling threads all over the place.īeing a post-apocalyptic world leads to the expectation of barren environments, but Xeno milks this to ridiculous effect. Meanwhile, characters have trysts that come out of the blue, go nowhere, and are quickly forgotten. The most interesting story thread, Talis’ mechanical arm, which gets referenced several times throughout the game and seems like a major point considering his hatred of machines, doesn’t tie into the ending as one would expect it to, and isn’t even mentioned in the final sequence. Xeno has an interesting premise for a world, but it does little with it. While small bits of lore are occasionally dropped in dungeons, the story isn’t the focus of the game. In fairness, the main character doesn’t fall into the same trap as the rest of the male cast, but this is because he doesn’t have enough personality to be creepy he’s simply a ball of rage focused at the machines and little else interests him.Įnemy design is delightfully over the top. The scenes involving the female cast are painful to watch considering the regressive, juvenile writing that accompanies them. Suffering through dialog that seems crafted with horny male teenagers in mind does nothing to get players outside that demographic group engaged with the narrative.
This isn’t just locker room talk, as the male cast will bluntly question the women about their sexual pasts. Most of the male cast is creepy openly opining on the potential virginity of new female members. Occasionally survivors are found and rescued, but that doesn’t improve the narrative. The story is a bit threadbare, with much of the game involving traveling to settlements only to find that each has been wiped out shortly before Talis arrived, destroyed by Catastrophus, the giant machine responsible for killing his mother. Talis is determined to exact vengeance for the death of his mother from the machines that have taken so much from him. The main character, named Talis by default, is one of a few people left alive in the sandy expanse that was once Tokyo. To this end, it created both machines and genetically modified animals equipped with cannons, missiles, and other armaments to exterminate the human population. Unfortunately, NOA decided that humans were the root of the problems and set about eradicating them. Humans in the past had constructed a supercomputer called NOA to solve great problems such as global warming. The world of Xeno takes place several generations after a nuclear apocalypse. While Xeno has plenty of entertaining oddities, they aren’t able to save the game from being an underwhelming experience. Unfortunately, while Xeno finally allows those outside of Japan to tangle with all sorts of armored beasts, it proves to be an instance where I should have been careful what I wished for. Metal Max Xeno remedies this deficiency, and acting as a soft reboot, it eschews the connections to earlier games that were an impediment to localization. For years I’ve jealously watched releases come to the Nintendo 3DS in Japan, but the west was always left without missile launcher-equipped dinosaurs to fight. With a post-apocalyptic setting and tank combat, it’s a unique outlier among JRPGs.
#HEAVY METAL MACHINES PS4 REVIEW SERIES#
Metal Max is a long-running series that has only once previously had a release outside of Japan. Where’s My Shark With a Frickin’ Laser Beam?
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