PositronX PC Review

PositronX caught my eye because it scratches that itch that every gamer gets from time to time; the longing to play a game without complicated storylines that is stuffed to the brim with pure explosive, destructive action. An amalgamation of FPS and Roguelite, fighting through hordes of robot enemies as one of 7 unlockable characters with a variety of weapons at your disposal. No two runs will ever be the same!

The core FPS gameplay is all there; wall jumping, shooting enemies and utilising your powers to gain the advantage in combat. To mix things up, there are 17 different weapons, 60 implants that give you different active and passive abilities (each with 2 modifiers) and 77 imprints that add further bonuses to your character. The high level of variance available creates an exciting highly replayable experience…for about 5 hours. Unfortunately, from my experience the majority of modifiers present have very minimal effect on changing the feel of each run, not helped in part by lack of ability visuals; the only modifier that made the game feel at all different is the one that makes exploding barrels stick to enemies. 

To counter the disappointing passives the game has a lot of cool active abilities to play around with. Up to 3 can be equipped at one time allowing you to mix it up between runs. Some of them can be abused e.g. the healing ability having a 15 second cooldown but if you kill all but 1 enemy you can sit in a corner and keep using it. This kind of exploitation could be prevented if only the game would refresh your active abilities once you dealt a certain amount of damage therefore rewarding fast paced combat.

Unlocking new weapons and characters as you progress through the game becomes increasingly more tedious because the starting guns are nothing we haven’t seen before; in a game where the main focus is the guns I’d expect something new and fun to play around with when I first start the game but instead you start with a pistol and unlock the other starter weapons like a rocket launcher or shotgun. When there’s minimal to no story, you are relying on exciting weapons and abilities to keep the enjoyment going run after run. Adding further depth to the game with ricocheting bullets and elemental effects will not only improve the visual look but gameplay as a whole. Despite this room for improvement, Scorpius Games did a great job at making a busy FPS still look beautiful. A lot of times it’s hard to see a bullet or enemy when there are a lot of effects but fortunately in PositronX this wasn’t a problem.

The game goes out of its way to make what should be fast paced combat become more sluggish due to the fact the AI is just plain dumb. Most of the time when I’m playing, the enemy is walking into a wall, facing a different direction when shooting at you and instead of going into cover they just walk straight at you. There is no reward in taking the risk of running in to face enemies up close, supporting the fast paced action that is advertised when you lose a large amount of HP and do not recover enough to make this tactic worthwhile. 

There are enemies in nearly every room that blow up when you go near them, and others that turn around instantly meaning you can’t get behind them to do some damage before running away limiting the play styles you can utilise in this game. I found the best weapon to be the sniper rifle because I could camp out somewhere on the map and slowly kill things off not making for the most exciting of gameplay. 

The bosses provide a very mediocre addition at the end of each level appearing as just regular enemies made bigger and stronger. They’re boring to look at and with no epic music to boot they become instantly forgettable. Bosses should be something you look forward to facing and despite proving a fair challenge during my runs they require further improvements such as design and unique boss abilities to mix things up.

For the first few hours I had fun playing around with the different mechanics PositronX has to offer, the movement of the game feels well-polished and it was enjoyable to just jump around and shoot things for the 20-30 minutes the runs last. Finding a nice synergy of active abilities and dying a bunch trying to figure out what the new enemies do gives you more reason to keep coming back.

Overall, I think PositronX, despite currently being very average, has the framework necessary to become something greater with some added touches and fixes. During early access the game received plenty of updates but perhaps it’s time to go back to basics and look to improve those key elements that make a successful FPS game to keep you coming back for more.