PositronX is a mix of an old-school Shooter alongside the often time brutal randomness of a Rogue-like. It takes place on the planet of Kelper, a location meant to be humanity’s new home as Earth has met an untimely demise. Starting off, we have a single robot character unlocked from a total of seven. Taking control of it will introduce us to how things are on Kelper. You will soon find that it is hardly a home away from home for humans, in fact, there isn’t a sign of any living human anywhere. What you will find is a legion of very hostile robots that are all too eager to shoot you on sight. Far from helpless ourselves, we must try to get to the center of the planet itself where the mastermind of this disturbing event resides.
Our first character is equipped with a pistol. That may seem like a typical starter weapon for an FPS as you try to get your hands on bigger guns and never use it again, but this is far from the case. You will soon discover that PositronX is just as much of a Rouge-like as it is an FPS. Not only are the areas and enemies randomly generated every time you start a new game, it is also heavily focused on character building. You see, each room is a self-isolated location indicated by a grid on the overall map. Clearing a room will always net you a treasure chest that can contain new weapons, Implants, Cores, or gun modifications. The latter is arguably one of the most important since enemies will eventually start to scale up in total hit-points, while your gun’s damage remains the same. Get good enough drops and your unassuming Pistol could easily do a ton more damage than that of an unmodded rocket launcher.
That is a double-edged sword, in this case. It means that once you start upgrading a weapon, the rest of your arsenal becomes that much less useful against the increasingly powerful foes. Heck, it is actually better to deny taking any additional weapons. That is in order to increase the chances of receiving mods to make your gun of choice even more powerful. This is not the type of FPS where weapon switching will be a great tactic during fights. The gun’s stats due to the Rouge-like aspect are too great. What will be of more interest to you will be the Implants you may receive after clearing a room. You may have noticed the Q, E, and R hotkeys in the middle of the screen. These pertain to the abilities you gain from an Implant and are game-changing powers that can turn the tide of a battle. Our first character begins with Time Control. This allows us to slow down time at the press of a button, enabling us to navigate past overwhelming firepower and fight back much easier than we otherwise could.
You can equip up to two other Implants at any one time, each being greatly different and bringing their own unique opportunities in a fight. An example being that you could slow down time with your original implant, create a Clone of yourself that uses whatever weapon you have, then Teleport yourself to a rooftop to pick off enemies from the ensuing chaos. There are a ton of Implants to discover and they can be further upgraded. Take the Time Control ability again, you could get an upgrade in where its duration is extended when killing an enemy while in slow-mo. With a powerful enough gun, you could easily clear the entire room before it runs out. That is just one upgrade of many more powerful ones to discover, and they all stack. All of your abilities have a countdown timer before you can use them again, yet with enough upgrades, it is possible to lower that timer to near nothing. It all depends on your drops from clearing a room. You could end up with seriously cool and completely different play-styles even using the exact same weapon & implant between runs.
Did you think that was all there was to Implants? Nope. Those were just the Active ones that require your input to use. The passive implants can be just as interesting and game-changing. Want a jetpack to zoom past any projectiles and environmental hazards without a care in the world? How about being surrounded by a field of electricity that will zap any enemy that gets near you? A bot that regenerates your health so you don’t need to worry about health pick-ups? With enough luck, all of them can be yours and many more than I can possibly list here. All of them can be upgraded as well, which can lead to new effects. Oddly enough, out of the eight slots you have to install Implants, only four are available to new players. You need to earn enough experience and you’ll permanently be able to use them in future runs. It is a completely unnecessary handicap that takes some of the fun out of the game for little reason and makes it counter-intuitively more difficult when you are just starting off.
In your first playthrough, you are limited to only being able to carry two weapons as well. After gaining enough experience, that is increased to four weapons in future playthroughs. I could understand this initial restriction more than the Implants, since a new player randomly upgrading between all four weapons will be in for a really bad time. It is possible to get by on skill alone, though it will likely be just as much a trial on your patience as your experience with FPS games if your damage output is low. That makes it even more puzzling that you can’t use half of your Implant slots considering how important it can be to learn how to synergize them and learn their uses. It also leads to it not being uncommon to clear a room, get hyped for your reward, and find that you can’t even use it. On that note, PositronX does not have the Steam Cloud Save feature, unfortunately. If you plan to play this on more than one computer, you’ll have to be mindful of manually transferring your save data to avoid starting from scratch again.
Luckily, the Cores have infinite slots and have effects just as wild as any Implant. I vividly remember the first one I got that was called Heat Synthesizer and having to do a double-take on its description. It allows you to regain health from the ensuing blast of shooting an explosive barrel. So ideally, if a barrel is accidentally hit in a firefight, you will want to run straight into it to take in the blast for maximum effect, and not let the free healing go to waste. The next Core I was offered would have ironically enough been very useful if I hadn’t taken the prior one. Said explosive barrels will magnetize and stick to enemies upon entering a room, which sure, would likely kill them, but also leave me with one less healing source. Another example of a Core’s effect is one called Wings. You initially start off with a double jump, yet how would you like infinite jumps?! That’s right, just mash that spacebar and you can effectively fly if you choose that core. Don’t like the platforming that some rooms require to navigate around? Then hope you pick up Extra Layer and you’ll be able to casually walk through lava or any other hazard like it ain’t no thing.
Taking into account all the Guns, Implants, and Cores, the customization is truly insane. You never know just what you are in for when you start a new run with how amazingly wacky stuff can get. Each of the 17 weapons have an alt-fire, further increasing your options. Not to mention that upgrades are not always stat based. Sure you can increase your starting pistol’s damage and attack speeds, yet you can also turn it into a near-automatic weapon whose bullets ricochet around to cause more damage or have your bullets bend mid-flight to ensure you always hit your enemies. Once again, even starting with the same weapons and abilities, things can greatly vary. The sheer amount of stuff to experience here is praiseworthy. As much I’ve played PositronX as of this review, I am still finding new stuff. Each of the seven characters have their own starting cores, weapon, and implants too. You can start off being able to summon allies, or play as someone that effectively turns this title into SuperHot in that time only moves when you do.
Your initial character is one of the strongest in the game. It starts off with some really strong cores and implants. His ability to slow down time is incredibly useful, he is able to infinitely jump in slow-mo, gains an extra 20% experience, and will always magically give you more ammo if you ever run out completely. The latter means you have infinite ammo for all intents and purposes. Ultimately, none of their abilities are unique to that character, as you may find them via drops anyways. They are more of a starter build of synergized items that you choose depending on your playstyle. Repeatedly playing as a character does have its perks though. You will slowly but surely build a stat percentage bonus that will differentiate them more on future playthroughs. What stat that is depends on which of them it is. It could range from your overall health, defense, or critical hit chance.
As for the actual gameplay, it very much plays like an old school shooter. There is no reloading, most weapons don’t have iron sights, and there are no hit-scan projectiles. Enemies in the first area of the game throw really slow projectiles, but by the end are flinging them like pro baseball players. The same applies to you. It is the kind of game where your bullets travel so slow you have to shoot where you think an enemy is headed instead of where they are currently at. The term for this is called “leading” and requires significantly more skill than the point & shoot nature of modern styled FPS titles. I don’t say that to sound elitist. PositronX is just considerably more demanding of your aim than what some may be used to. It is a game chock fall of tiny enemies with some that can both fly and move at absurd speeds, sporadic enemy movement every half second even if they haven’t noticed you, as well as foes that can teleport around. If you thought that dealing with the slimes in Quake 1 was bad, wait until you face some of the enemies in this title.
To counteract the need to account for projectile travel and at times the near pixel-perfect accuracy required, there are no hit-zones to an enemy. Wherever you hit them will lead to the same amount of damage. Enemies do not flinch when shot either, at least starting off. That means that despite repeatedly shooting them they can still fire back. You will need to upgrade the Stagger stat of the weapon, and even then, it is percentage-based. With the perfect accuracy that your foe has, you do not want to risk standing still and taking a projectile to the face. Even when an enemy is completely unaware of you, as soon as you let off a shot at it this will cause him to robotically snap towards your direction and immediately fire back. This last fact I am not a fan of. It just feels far too artificial to have a foe suddenly shoot back at the exact millisecond that you left-click on the mouse, and with pixel-perfect accuracy at that. With none of the projectiles being hit-scan you can always avoid their retaliation and go about your merry way, however, it is something that you can’t help but to notice no matter how long you play the game.
Movement is a huge part of PositronX. As soon as a firefight breaks out you shouldn’t stop moving until every foe is defeated. Your enemies do not miss. If you’ve been detected there is likely a projectile flying towards you that very second and you do not want to be there when it reaches its destination. A piece of scenery could make useful cover, yet getting too comfortable there can be quite deadly. There are some melee-based foes that move faster than you, or are simply small enough to have escaped your sight until it’s too late. All the characters we can play as are not particularly fast on the ground, unless we find and install the Agile implant. Verticality will be your best friend in this title. Make good use of your double jumping to hop right over enemies, land on a crate or something, then shoot quickly before being on the move once more in case a ranged foe spotted you. Wall jumping is another important feature. You can use a wall to infinitely jump upward until you reach a ceiling or the end of that structure. Being that you are facing the wall, it leaves you temporarily defenseless. Learning how to flick around to let off a shot then face the wall again to continue hopping is a difficult skill to learn, but a worthwhile one.
As handy as wall jumping can be, it is possibly one of the most dangerous places to be. Not only could a swarm of melee-based foes gather below waiting for you to mess up, but the fall damage is substantial. It doesn’t really feel like the type of game where fall damage does it any favors, yet the bigger problem is at what point it activates. Even seemingly safe jumps onto the floor can take a chunk of health out of you, causing you to always double-jump right before you hit the ground and waste time we typically can’t afford to lose. Some form of indicator when you are in danger of fall damage would greatly help, allowing us to avoid wasting time as you flutter jump on the way down. There are four zones overall, with each getting progressively more uninhabitable and disjointed architecturally as you head into the core of the planet. The simple act of using a jump-pad whether on purpose or not can damage you. I wouldn’t call it unfair, though it does harm the flow of the game and whose inclusion gets progressively more severe with the increasingly fast pace of the later zones.
Every zone has both a Secret and a Challenge room. A secret room consists of throwing a near-transparent portal hidden somewhere in that zone. It can be hidden in any room and stepping into one will teleport you into an area containing a Treasure chest drop. There are no unique items here, yet an extra loot drop is always welcome and further increases your chances of reaching the end of the game. The Challenge room follows a similar concept. It will spawn an unassuming crate in a random location and finding it will grant you an offer. That being that you can take the random loot it has right on the spot, but the next combat area will see you taking ten times the damage. Most characters are far from tanks, such a handicap can easily end your run. If you are brave and confident enough to pull it off, then you are further rewarded with Experience and Core Fragments (currency) considering you actually survive.
Both of those are found within the regular combat rooms. Every room on the map is essentially an isolated arena, with only one giving you a moment of reprieve, that being the Shop. It is where you can spend your core fragments that you pick off of defeated enemies or get as rewards to buy Implants, Cores, Weapons, or Weapon mods. This removes some of your reliance on RNG as you are given the chance to pick from the 9 available items to customize your character how you want. The available items are random, though you can pay a fine to re-roll their inventory for a new round of gear. Every time you re-roll the shop, it will get more expensive to do so again. It also gets more expensive in later zones, meaning it’s ultimately cheaper to buy what you want then constantly refresh their inventory as early as possible. Well, that is typically the case, at least. This being a rouge-like, you never know if you’ll find a Core with an effect that permanently lowers store prices after you already spent it all.
At the end of each zone will be a boss awaiting you. Predictability, these will give you quite a fight on your hands. They visually appear to be a massively up-scaled version of a regular enemies model, though pack new attacks and abilities up their sleeve. Not that you have much time to sit there to gawk at them. From the moment they lay sight on you, they will lay down the pressure with their great speeds and overwhelming firepower. The first three zones randomize what boss you will face and even the environment you face them in. It will take a good amount of playtime to see them all and learn how they operate, yet are all dealt with the same way. Shoot until one of you stops moving. There are no gimmicks in how to take them down. That is easier said than done, however. One more thing bosses share in common is that they all summon a seemingly endless amount of minions. It becomes a balancing act of knowing when to attack the boss directly and when to pick off the weaker foes before you get swarmed.
PositronX’s rouge-like nature can lead to some runs being far easier than others. It is par for the course for that genre. Something I always find myself disliking on every run is the entire fourth zone before reaching the final big bad. They go overboard with the scale of things. There are far too many enemies, the rooms become too large, and some areas are much too dark. Let me begin with the issues involving the enemies. Firstly, they become serious bullet sponges and is the entire reason I stick to upgrading a single weapon for higher damage output. Even then, fighting well over forty enemies takes a depressingly long amount of time. It gets to the point that I’m just hoping against hope that I come upon the boss room as soon as possible, finding the Shop or not be damned. The environments contribute to this too. This is not a Serious Sam type of combat system where all the foes come at you at once. You fight small pockets of them within a room and ideally not alert more than you can handle. It becomes much too common to have small groups of stragglers all over the place and have to waste even more time hunting them down within the massive labyrinthine-like rooms.
The third and final flaw of the last fourth zone actually extends to the entire game. Its lighting is terrible. Heck, the pitch blackness of the final zone is kind of a mercy compared to the gross overuse of bloom going on here with any of the light sources. From lamps, lasers, or just about anything that casts light, you can bet that it will be blindingly bright. PositronX defaults to an HDR color gradient, and there are many others to choose from, yet all of them retain this issue. Going into the advanced settings reveals some graphical options and turning them all to their lowest does not fix the insane bloom either. Making matters worse is that turning off the chromatic abbreviation and motion blur settings does not function, blinding you further. I can not recall the last game that I’ve played where the visuals affected it so massively. Not helping matters is that your own character makes a ton more noise moving around than your enemies, so your only form of knowing they are there or even right next to you is visually.
There are several other effects that hamper your ability to see. The haze seeping from the lava, a gravity field or black hole distorting your vision, as well as the really aggressive motion blur when moving. A fast-paced, old school shooter is the last genre you’d want with these issues. I would honestly say that PositronX would be neigh unplayable if it wasn’t for an ability you always have to highlight every enemy’s location while holding the Crtl key. Without that, searching for a straggler enemy in a giant room would be so much worse, and the amount of times you’d get ambushed by a foe you couldn’t see would skyrocket. And yet I continue to play PositronX, with full intention to keep on doing so after this review. It is one of the most entertaining FPS games I have played in years, despite the severe flaws it contains. The gunplay is solid and the amount of things to discover in it is overwhelming. With nearly twenty hours that I’ve spent with it, I’m about halfway to seeing all of the cores/implants. I’ve had nowhere near enough time to see what wacky ways all of the 17 guns can be upgraded. Another thing I have barely touched is the starting modifiers that give you things like a Hard Mode, a time limit to finish each room, or beginning with random gear instead of choosing a character.
Most of the problems I have with the title are not deeply ingrained into it and could possibly be solved in the future. Chief among these are the visuals. Just give us the option to turn off bloom and other effects, as well as fixing that nonfunctional motion blur toggle. As it is now, I wouldn’t blame you if you took a look at the pictures in this review and instantly put away your wallet. There is something special here, however. Something very much worth experiencing if you fall into the niche of enjoying both old school shooters and rogue-likes. They are interconnected tightly, so you’ll truly have to enjoy both, but the sheer insanity it brings to the table is a delight. From being able to turn yourself tiny and start pistol-whipping all of your foe’s shins, to stopping a volley of gunfire and even enemies within a force field that freezes time, it is a ton of fun. I have played a ton of FPS games in my time and none are even close to being as creative as this. That ‘because we can’ attitude of just tossing a ton of crazy weapons, abilities, and possibilities has paid off in spades. Backed by solid gameplay, you’d be hard-pressed to put this game down once you get past the rough learning curve. With the vast amount of content you get from its 20 US dollar price, PositronX is what I’d consider a rough stone that can easily be a hidden gem with just that bit more polish.
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