#53: Xardion

XARDION! (What does that mean?!?)

Xardion is a game I'd never heard of before, and the game actually opened with a bit of an intro before the title screen which game me a bit of an idea about what was going on. There are three planets under attack by another galaxy or something, and they decide to band together to fight off the invaders. Each planet sends a champion in a ship which makes me think this game is going to be a side scrolling shooter with three different characters to choose from, like UN Squadron. Yay. I sure haven't played enough of that genre thus far!

Panthera, I choose you!

It turns out the game is actually a platformer with three different characters to choose from. You can swap between characters by hitting select which actually reminds me a lot of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game on the NES. Each of the three characters is significantly different which is more like The Lost Vikings. Both of those games are awesome. Unfortunately this game is not.

Tongue attack, go!

It turns out the game only seems to use two of the six buttons which makes me very sad. The three characters are different, but not in good ways. One guy can aim his gun up which makes him the best. One guy is a cat so he can crawl into tunnels which makes him situationally useful. The third guy just seemed terrible.

Interestingly the game has experience bars so your guys can level up by killing dudes. Unfortunately experience isn't shared, so Triton (who could shoot up) ended up gaining some levels while everyone else kept sucking.

I made it to one boss fight and made good use of character swapping to keep fighting as long as I could. But then I died. It restarted me at the start of the level with full health on the guy who died and old health of the other two... Which really made me never want to use those guys again.

There were lots of item pickups I could get, and I think they were incrementing my numbers on the select menu, but I never found a way to actually use any of them for any purpose. Which made me sad. Maybe that stuff was used after beating the first boss. Maybe some arcane sequence of button presses would work it out. But I couldn't find a way.

Infinite continues and a level system means I'm pretty confident I eventually could have won. I just didn't want to. The controls were sluggish too. But I feel like if I'd played this game as a kid I would have liked it a fair bit and definitely would have played it a lot.

Rating: C+