Spirits of Xanadu is a space paranoia FPS developed by Night Dive Studios, a company mainly known for making old games compatible with modern operating systems. They have brought games such as Sid Meier's Colonization, The 7th Guest and System Shock 2 to Linux using DOSBox and Wine. Spirits of Xanadu is their original title and is inspired by System Shock 2 and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqngZTu5lZY
At first the game seems quite cool though very simplistic. You are an engineer sent to fix the systems of the exploration ship Xanadu after it has gone completely dark following its attempt to explore a mysterious planet. You have no idea why the ship is broken. But you don't have an option, since failure to fix the critical systems and navigating the Xanadu back to Earth would mean instantly getting court martialled. However, it seems the security systems on board the Xanadu won't make the job all that easy.
The plot isn't really all that original and has been explored hundreds of times in various scifi games and movies. Just based on what I mentioned above you are probably able to draw rather clear lines of what has happened on Xanadu and how the game is more or less going to go. Being predictable isn't necessarily a great sin though and personally I liked the setting and these kinds of plots are still interesting for me.
The plot isn't the only simple thing in Spirits of Xanadu though. The game uses graphics that are approaching minimalism. Models have a low polygon count and the texture work is also, well, minimalistic. The rooms and corridors of the ship look bland and sterile. In the end the whole ship looks quite gray and boring.
The gameplay mainly involves three things: killing robots, solving puzzles and reading/listening to notes. The game has no cutscenes or dialog and the story is told to you through ripped pages from journals or audio logs from the crew members of the Xanadu. And when you are not getting immersed in the backstory of what happened to Xanadu, you are either solving the puzzles to get some of the Xanadu's systems online or fending off an attack by a curious security bot. The puzzles are pretty nice and some of them require plenty of thinking to solve. Luckily you don't need to solve the most difficult puzzles in order to play through the game but they might be vital if you want to unlock the two alternate endings the game has. Some of the easier puzzles just require you to find items scattered around the ship and put them back in place but the hardest puzzle requires plenty of patience and a good eye.
On the combat side the game is sadly also about as bland as the corridors it usually happens in. You start out with a fairly ordinary blaster pistol which allows you to either fire quick shots or charge it and fire a more powerful shot. You can find two more weapons in the game, a shotgun and an SMG. None of the weapons are especially pleasing and the SMG wasn't even worth the time it took me to find it. The enemies you are fighting against are are also relatively simple. You have flying robots that try to zap you at close range, robot guards that try to shoot you on sight, turrets, cameras and walking robots that run up to you and explode. They are not all that easy to kill and you often need to run away from danger and hide to stay alive. Not that staying alive is all that important since upon death you simply get transported in to the ship's brig and you don't lose items or progress.
For me the biggest flaw of the game is the size of the ship. The ship only has a handful of rooms and that makes for a really short game. Your first playthrough will be around 4 hours or possibly less, depending on the amount of time you use to read all the notes and explore every nook and cranny of the ship. 4 hours might not be a bad length for some games but here it's too little. The game tries to squeeze more story into the ship than is feasible and the end result is a game that seems awfully rushed. It's sort of like reading a novel that has been squeezed down into the size of a short story. The game would have required more mystery, more suspense and more physical room for the story. If the ship were two or three times larger than it is, I think the story would have flowed more naturally.
Then there are the performance issues. Spirits of Xanadu uses Unity3D and sadly it's not one of those Unity titles that perform nicely. Regardless of the simplistic graphics the game tanks heavily and framedrops are pretty much guaranteed. The game remains playable most of the time but you would expect a lot better performance from a game of this degree of graphical quality. I also had some problems getting some of the controls (such as crouch) to work properly but dropping “env LC_ALL=C %command%” into the Steam launch options for the game fixed these problems. Thank you viewers of the Friday Livestream for helping me get find that workaround!
Overall the game has some nice ideas but the execution is lacking. It's not a particularly bad game and I enjoyed playing it but the abruptness of the ending was kind of a let down. I do not consider it worth the 14.99€ they are asking for it and would recommend you to either skip it or buy it discounted. Or buy the game that inspired this one, System Shock 2.
DRM-Free Humble Widget: http://www.spiritsofxanadu.com/
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqngZTu5lZY
At first the game seems quite cool though very simplistic. You are an engineer sent to fix the systems of the exploration ship Xanadu after it has gone completely dark following its attempt to explore a mysterious planet. You have no idea why the ship is broken. But you don't have an option, since failure to fix the critical systems and navigating the Xanadu back to Earth would mean instantly getting court martialled. However, it seems the security systems on board the Xanadu won't make the job all that easy.
The plot isn't really all that original and has been explored hundreds of times in various scifi games and movies. Just based on what I mentioned above you are probably able to draw rather clear lines of what has happened on Xanadu and how the game is more or less going to go. Being predictable isn't necessarily a great sin though and personally I liked the setting and these kinds of plots are still interesting for me.
The plot isn't the only simple thing in Spirits of Xanadu though. The game uses graphics that are approaching minimalism. Models have a low polygon count and the texture work is also, well, minimalistic. The rooms and corridors of the ship look bland and sterile. In the end the whole ship looks quite gray and boring.
The gameplay mainly involves three things: killing robots, solving puzzles and reading/listening to notes. The game has no cutscenes or dialog and the story is told to you through ripped pages from journals or audio logs from the crew members of the Xanadu. And when you are not getting immersed in the backstory of what happened to Xanadu, you are either solving the puzzles to get some of the Xanadu's systems online or fending off an attack by a curious security bot. The puzzles are pretty nice and some of them require plenty of thinking to solve. Luckily you don't need to solve the most difficult puzzles in order to play through the game but they might be vital if you want to unlock the two alternate endings the game has. Some of the easier puzzles just require you to find items scattered around the ship and put them back in place but the hardest puzzle requires plenty of patience and a good eye.
On the combat side the game is sadly also about as bland as the corridors it usually happens in. You start out with a fairly ordinary blaster pistol which allows you to either fire quick shots or charge it and fire a more powerful shot. You can find two more weapons in the game, a shotgun and an SMG. None of the weapons are especially pleasing and the SMG wasn't even worth the time it took me to find it. The enemies you are fighting against are are also relatively simple. You have flying robots that try to zap you at close range, robot guards that try to shoot you on sight, turrets, cameras and walking robots that run up to you and explode. They are not all that easy to kill and you often need to run away from danger and hide to stay alive. Not that staying alive is all that important since upon death you simply get transported in to the ship's brig and you don't lose items or progress.
For me the biggest flaw of the game is the size of the ship. The ship only has a handful of rooms and that makes for a really short game. Your first playthrough will be around 4 hours or possibly less, depending on the amount of time you use to read all the notes and explore every nook and cranny of the ship. 4 hours might not be a bad length for some games but here it's too little. The game tries to squeeze more story into the ship than is feasible and the end result is a game that seems awfully rushed. It's sort of like reading a novel that has been squeezed down into the size of a short story. The game would have required more mystery, more suspense and more physical room for the story. If the ship were two or three times larger than it is, I think the story would have flowed more naturally.
Then there are the performance issues. Spirits of Xanadu uses Unity3D and sadly it's not one of those Unity titles that perform nicely. Regardless of the simplistic graphics the game tanks heavily and framedrops are pretty much guaranteed. The game remains playable most of the time but you would expect a lot better performance from a game of this degree of graphical quality. I also had some problems getting some of the controls (such as crouch) to work properly but dropping “env LC_ALL=C %command%” into the Steam launch options for the game fixed these problems. Thank you viewers of the Friday Livestream for helping me get find that workaround!
Overall the game has some nice ideas but the execution is lacking. It's not a particularly bad game and I enjoyed playing it but the abruptness of the ending was kind of a let down. I do not consider it worth the 14.99€ they are asking for it and would recommend you to either skip it or buy it discounted. Or buy the game that inspired this one, System Shock 2.
DRM-Free Humble Widget: http://www.spiritsofxanadu.com/
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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