terrible interface

Xenoshyft started off as a pretty fun cooperative game where you and your friends played as different divisions of an evil megacorp that has run afoul of some alien bugs who dont take kindly to your mining operation. I was excited to see this iOS version of it for only $2, until I saw how cheap and bad it is.

You know a game has a bad interface when the tutorials awful robot voice (which is often drowned out by over-dramatic music) tells you that youll need to minimize the tutorial text in order to complete the next step of the tutorial. The devs should have just programmed that text prompt to pop up somewhere OTHER than on top of the card you had to select, but its clear that the priority on this adaptation of the physical game was "cheap and fast" rather than polish.

This is one of those digital card games that makes almost no attempt to take advantage of its digital nature. Your troops attack and health numbers go up to reflect bonuses from their equipment, but thats about it. They didnt even make it easy to see what cards you have in your hand. If youve played the physical version of Xenoshyft, you know that some equipment cards can be used to change how combat plays out. Take a moment to imagine how youd program that into a digital version of the game. Are you imagining it? Good. Now heres how this app does it - the screen zooms in and only shows the troop and the alien that are fighting. Got an auto-turret on a guy at the back of your lane that you could use to insta-kill an alien before it kills your guys? Well, better remember that (and use the games awkward method for switching between equipment cards on a troop) and zoom out and use it. Combat doesnt even have a visual indicator for when one side gets a special "first strike" attack, even though thats a HUGE deal.

If you reduce an alien to zero health with an effect, it just stays there (probably because of a sloppy way of programming the aliens who come back to life after their first death) leading to some awkward "Wait... did I kill it or not?" moments.

It would have added a ton of personality to the game if each troop spoke some lines (like that one card game thats stupidly successful on iOS), but no, all we get is the robot narrator. Troops dont even scream when they die.

The militia card has no text and is blurry. Great quality control in this game!

Xenoshyft can be played solo, but it really works best as a multiplayer game, and it requires a LOT of coordination between players. "Oops, Im fighting a boss, does anyone have a spare grenade?" "Can I use your discount so I can afford that armor?" That sort of thing. This app is so bad that Im not going to slog through a multiplayer game to see if theres ANY mechanism for properly communicating, but I doubt it!

Tartrazine about XenoShyft, v1.0