Shoter – MMO Fallout

Editor’s note: We were provided a key for this review.

PositronX is a rogue-lite first person shooter developed by Scorpius Games and released late last month. After putting a number of hours in I can safely say that this is an entertaining budget game that has some issues. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a good buy at $20.

As a rogue-lite game, the metaphorical meat and potatoes of PositronX’s gameplay revolves around clearing out randomly generated rooms of randomly generated numbers of randomly generated enemies. The first thing you’ll notice when traveling around the map is that PositronX gates off each “room” and separates them via very short loading screens (barely a second in my experience). I’m not sure if this design choice was due to memory management but it was an experience that started out a little jarring and slowly became smoother as I went along.

The graphics in PositronX are serviceable. There is a a lot of neon and bright colors and occasionally it can turn the game into a jumbled mess that I can only describe as pure sensory overload. It can get overwhelming from time to time, especially as you progress deeper into the levels and more enemies begin spawning in closer quarters. It never quite hit the level of frustrating for me.

Controls are functional, however that being said I am not a fan of the omission of a crouch and I’ve been spoiled by shooters in recent years to have expected a dash button to help dodge projectiles. It’s not a game killer that neither are present, but it would be an improvement if they had.

Positron’s development team is going for a retro-style aesthetic which goes some ways to explaining why features like crouching or dash dodging isn’t present. Enemies are a mishmash of generic robots that could have been improved with a little more variety. The same goes for the rooms that are rather generic and same-looking. Variety is the spice of life provided I haven’t mixed it up with pink Himalayan sea salt again.

There is a graphics option for “retro” pixelating that can be scaled as well and I turned it up to max and immediately went blind. See the screenshot below for my example.

Some things were not meant to be viewed on a 26 inch 1080p computer monitor. Thankfully the pixelate option is off by default and you can turn things off like lens dirt, chromatic aberration, and motion blur. YOU CAN TURN OFF MOTION BLUR! This should be an option in every game. Field of view can be scaled up to 130, which should also be a default in any FPS.

There is also a handy tool in the form of the control button which silhouettes every remaining robot on the level so you can find them. Sometimes they blend into the scenery and can be difficult to spot. As you kill enemies you gain core fragments that can be used at a workshop that appears on each stage offering a variety of upgrades. At the end of each loading zone you also open a chest containing some kind of upgrade for your weapons or abilities.

Upgrades are the core of Positron’s creativity in my opinion. Naturally you’ll get upgrades for your weapons to do more damage, but then you come across more interesting implants like one that turns Positron into a Superhot-style game where time moves when you do. There are all sorts of upgrades for all styles of play from self-healing, damage reduction, increasing everyone’s damage output, barriers, time stop, etc.

You do have a limit in your weapons/implants/upgrades but they can be swapped out at a moment’s notice. There are several classes to unlock with each one carrying its own starting weapons, implants, and bonuses. Each class has a special that levels up and carries long term, and you can add in a number of bonuses including a soft-core mode that gives several extra lives.