Xenopurge doesn’t sell itself very well, in my view. Firstly, that title rather rebounded off my brain the first time I saw it. Sounds like a cleaning agent for when your pet alien widdles on the carpet. Secondly, I flinched when I saw the word ‘Auto-battler’. I’ve had bad experiences with that. It conjures up images of big flashy effects and listlessly moving between hordes of enemies. It’s just not my kind of genre. Xenopurge isn’t that at all.
Let me demonstrate what Xenopurge is with a quick story. I was on a mission to collect a package. My three squaddies were Morse, Hicks and Ripley. Ripley grabbed the package and made a break for the exit, with Hicks covering. Ripley evac’d and Hicks held ground with his rifle while Morse dashed for the exit. Except he never made it. He was blindsided by two aliens. Hicks tried to help, shooting from a distance, but was ordered to evac. Hicks was forced to escape to the sound of Morse being torn apart. So yes, this is an auto-battler, but it’s a special mutation.
The Perfect Organism
What’s remarkable about this Xenopurge story is that it’s almost exclusively told through little dots. The idea is that we’re a faceless, voiceless commander with their face pressed up against a computer screen. We order our soldiers in to secure packages, fight aliens or collect intel and then, if we’re lucky, get them out alive again. Save for blurry pictures of our soldiers’ faces, and a few panicked yells, we’re completely removed from the experience. All we see are dots. Picture the famous scene in Alien where they use the motion detector.
What’s more, our control over these soldiers is limited to a handful of generic commands. The basic mission structure is a fairly straightforward one. We start by picking where to deploy our squaddies, then we let them loose to explore the map. Each mission has a set objective, usually to collect something, with a secondary objective of escaping. We can issue generic commands, such as ordering members to group up or hold ground, but exploring and fighting is done solely by the AI. Hence the ‘auto-battler’ bit, I suppose. I actually really like this gameplay concept.
It works to create a rather magnificent amount of tension. The limited control means you can often see failure coming, but have no real way to deal with it. When a door opens and your blue dot is suddenly surrounded by red dots, with no help in sight, all you do is watch and despair. Enemies spawn in waves, with a big old counter on top, and the music ratchets up right as it gets close to zero. Watching your guys frantically run to the exit and realising, much too late, that they aren’t going to make it is a wonderful kind of horror.
Game Over, Man
Crucially though, you do still have some say in how Xenopurge’s battles go. You have to pick the best moment to escape or heal up, and when to group up your lads or keep them exploring. It also follows the set roguelike pattern of picking which missions to take, buying upgrades, changing unit logic, and recruiting more soldiers. There’s a decent amount of things to unlock too, from weapons to different squad loadouts. So your choices do have an effect, even if the grunt work is done by the AI. Doing well on missions earns you more coins too, and losing soldiers means paying the cost of printing more clones.
Oh yeah, all of our soldiers are clones. That feeds into the general storyline of humanity throwing everything at an unspecified race of aliens. Xenopurge keeps its story largely separate from the gameplay, though. The gist is that we’re in an old facility that was doing human testing, and there’s an alien artifact exhibiting strange behaviour. It’s mainly told through rambling emails and slightly unsettling first-person sections. It’s not a bad story, just awkwardly told and the ending gets bizarre in a way that feels out of place, and not really justified.
Still, the actual meat and potatoes of the gameplay is great. Not to say I don’t have gripes, however. Perhaps the biggest issue is that our limited agency means runs on the higher difficulties are incredibly dependent on luck. If we find our objective early, then we’re golden. But Xeno waves get harder as time goes on, so poor luck means an exponentially harder mission. I also feel like there was scope for more mission types. There’re only four types, with tough missions just incorporating multiple objectives. That makes runs feel a little samey, especially as the levels are quite cramped.
Xenopurge – Hands-off Tension
Lastly, I’m a little undecided on whether or not I’d like our squaddies to be more characterised. On the one hand, the cloning mechanic means we’re with the same people from start to finish. Even without characterisation, I was getting attached. Learning a bit more about them might help that element. On the other hand, there’s a definite push towards us being completely removed from proceedings. It’s a cold, hard existence for a clone and the story leans into that. So maybe greater characterisation would be counter to the message that Xenopurge wants to push.
Either way, I enjoyed my time with it. It’s heartening to see a genre that I’ve struggled with change itself around to be something appealing. Xenopurge is an auto-battler, after a fashion, but one that has an engaging core gameplay loop and uses it to create some truly palpable tension. There’s a lot to unlock, too, so you can go through plenty of runs with it. The story side wasn’t implemented perfectly, but you should never underestimate the thrill of seeing a group of red dots get closer and closer to a blue one.
