I’m just going to cut straight to the chase: Exophobia is a barebones metroidvania-style FPS set on a crashed ship with its main redeeming quality being its pixel art style.
One of my biggest and main issues with the game is the overall lack of continuous gameplay. After you kill an enemy and return to that floor sometime later, they don’t respawn at all, meaning most of the time, you’ll be walking through empty rooms trying to find where you need to go. When you do get into combat, it mostly ends up being a loop of dodging attacks and charging your blaster up to either one shot or two-shot an enemy, depending on your blaster upgrade. That’s one area I do have to commend, in that throughout your journey in the ship, you can find upgrades for your blaster and health, bettering the odds of your survival. I also like how sliding into enemies is a valuable strategy as doing so will knock the enemy back a bit, allowing you to get a few shots off before they can attack again. Very helpful against the melee enemies, who I swear are some of the most annoying enemies in the game. Still, the fact that enemies don’t respawn makes this game a bit of a slog to playthrough.
This isn’t helped by the fact that there is a lot of backtracking you have to do in order to progress. Now, I understand that backtracking is standard in Metroidvania-style games and I do not have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is when the backtracking feels like padding in a game where it never feels like I’m progressing at all, even though the game said I’m moving forward. Whenever I made any sort of progress, I never felt any sort of real accomplishment from it. To put it bluntly, whenever I progressed, I was actually getting annoyed. Doesn’t help the fact that the level layout is confusing, even with a walkthrough. Here’s an example: After beating a boss on Floor 3, you get sent back to Floor 2 and you’re tasked with draining the water so you can progress. OK, no big deal. However, after draining the water and finding an optional health upgrade, I was stuck. I thought maybe that I was supposed to open a gate because I saw rooms on the other side but, after shooting it with more ammo than a Bandit weapon on Pandora (and making my trigger finger sore as the game does not have an autofire function) and looking everywhere for a switch, I was stumped. Until, I went back to the elevator and realized something: The Floor 2 I was on wasn’t the Floor 2 I needed to be on. No, I needed to backtrack through the entirety of Floor 1 to reach another elevator to take me to the Floor 2 I needed to be on in order to progress. When I figured that out and finally got back to Floor 2? Again, no real sense of accomplishment or sense that I was making progression. Sure, I found a new area and new boss to fight, but that was pretty much it.
Graphically, the game is fine. I’m not as huge of a fan of this style of retro graphics but it does get the job done, though it does make trying to find where to go a chore as I found it was very easy to get turned around and unintentionally backtracking to a previous location. Thankfully, there is an in-game map you can refer to and it does alleviate some of the issues, though the map has one dumb feature that I am not a fan of and that is it needs charging. I’m not joking, when you activate the map, there is a battery at the top of the screen, showing how long the map can be active before needing to be charged at a Save Point. Granted, the battery life is pretty long, so the fear of it running out is low but still exists. The animations in the game are fine, as well, and they get the job done, though I will admit that the alien designs are not the most creative ones I’ve seen as they all seem to have this Cthulhu look to them.
However, is there one other problem with this game that I can see being a major turn off: The constant screen tearing. Whenever there’s any sort of action happening, be it something simple like moving or complex like shooting, the screen is constantly tearing and it got to the point of being a major distraction for me. Even on the title screen, the screen was tearing, though it wasn’t too bad there.
You’re probably wondering if there is anything positive about this game and, to be honest, I was asking myself the same thing as I was playing it. Truth be told, the only things I liked about the game was the soundtrack, which had this almost 80’s rock feel to the whole thing. The title screen itself was pretty catchy and I was nodding my head to it while listening to it. The artstyle itself is pretty good, as well, though the color scheme on the first floor leaves a lot to be desired. Exophobia, for all intents and purposes, is not a terrible game and I did not go into this game wanting to hate it. Like with all games, I go in with an open-mind and, for the first hour or so, I was enjoying Exophobia. I could even see the effort put into it by the developer and some hints of a good game here and there. But, then the cracks really started to show and I went from somewhat enjoying the game to being really disappointed and bored by it.
