Xenopurge Review

Xenopurge may be one of the most tense auto-battler strategy games I have played, and that is in no small part to the influences it takes from Aliens. You are a commander on a remote and secure base, but your job is to issue commands to your squad on the ground as they infiltrate Xeno bases to kill aliens, rescue important people, and gather intelligence. Yet, apart from their portraits on the side of the screen, and hearing their voices through the radio, your squad are nothing more than small health bar and a designation number on your screen.

Humanity is at war with aliens and you are a member of MACE, the human military machine that is trying to fight back. The information you have is limited even as a Commander, but Xenopurge has a story threading through your encounters with the aliens, making you question what is really going on.

The game is played from a first person perspective as you view multiple screens to set up and manage your run and your squad. Four different squads eventually become available to you, but you will start with the Sentinel Squad which is a classic brute force squad that start with health packs and other boosts that improve speed and attack power. As you make your way through the ranks you eventually unlock the Huntsman, Synthetic, and Bioweave squad types. The Huntsman are more tactical, using turrets and mines to keep the enemy at bay, but they do not start with any health packs. Synthetics are all androids who have no healing ability, so have to be repaired between missions, but they can hack things like doors to stop enemies from getting through them for a time. The Bioweave are the weakest class to start off with, but each kill awards biomass which allows Bioweave units to upgrade themselves to become stronger.

Whichever squad you choose, you will only have limited input on their actions when on missions. Starting commands include prompting them to us a health stim, set up a turret, bioweave to create armour, or hack doors, though these depend on which squad you are using. As you progress through a run you may unlock new commands to use, hopefully selecting the most useful ones that complement your squad. Runs themselves consist of missions and stops at gear or upgrade points, where you can improve melee damage, get new weapons, upgrade soldier logic, or hire another soldier, boosting your squad size up to the maximum of four. Xenopurge is pretty generous with its rewards for successful missions, so you can always get some better gear, but not all of it in one hit.

All of this is viewed on a basic monitor in-game, where little green health bars engage with red health bars. You cannot direct where your squad will go, unless you get the ‘go to room’ command, and have to watch as they make their own decisions on how to proceed unless you give them a specific job to do, like collect a package. This is where some of that tension comes in for Xenopurge. For example, when one squad member is backed into a corner as enemies converge on them there is no way to get your other soldiers to run to their aid unless they are going in that direction themselves. The music really adds to the atmosphere, especially as the countdown gets closer to zero to triggering the next wave. Watching doors open on the screen where you have no line of sight is also tense, because you do not know what kind of enemy is coming for you. And hearing your soldiers shouting for help is another thing that really sells the immersion of being a commander who is helpless at times.

One issue I had with the AI was when ordering soldiers to extract, as they would just try and run past enemies or ignore fights that another soldier was engaged in, unless they get attacked themselves. I would imagine in real life, soldiers would still engage with enemies as they head to extraction points and help fellow squad mates. Another was that when all the rooms have been uncovered and most objectives cleared, units will stay in place even if they can hear another soldier shouting for backup. As I do not have the command to send soldiers to help their comrade, I would have hoped hearing it over the radio would spur them into action.

Despite those annoyances, Xenopurge has hooked me. There are a lot of run variations you can take on, with an achievement for completing each one, and squads can be altered with variants that give unique soldiers, such as one named Ripley who has a motion scanner. There are different zones across Xenopurge to explore with the later zones providing a much more difficult challenge due to being deep in Xeno space. Outside of the monitor, your commander can leave their seat and explore the cabin to read emails and watch news reports to learn of what is really happening. Here, the development team leave clues that something isn’t right and as you explore your little cabin and eventually what is beyond the door you too question the realities of the war.