Xatax (MS DOS, Pixel Painters, 1994)

Xatax is, for all intents and purposes, the embodiment of what I always reffered to as a "boring space shooter". You know the kind, the enemies either look like boring chunks of metal or like some vague oval shape with no real distinguishing features. The enemies in Xatax fall into the latter category. There's also about three or four enemy types throughout all the three episodes, and the programers resorted to colour swapping rather quickly.

The begining of every single level, and also
the background of every single level

Worst yet, the enemies themselves are the least concerning part of the game. If your ship is at any half decent power level, or if you just mash the control button quick enough, the enemies pose little to no threat, thanks to their predictable and unexciting movement patterns, and lack of any actual attacks beyond strolling along and hoping that they might bump into you, eventualy.

The level environments themselves are also not likely to kill you, as the scrolling never changes into any higher gear, and there are no obstacles like meteors, moving gates, spikes or anything of the sort to worry about.

The only thing that will possibly end up killing you are the stationary turrets, placed in all possible directions, and sometimes shooting at several different angles at once. These are sometimes hard to shoot or avoid due to the frequency of their shots and the fact that your main weapon, even fully powered up, only goes straight. Getting the missiles is recquired for these, as zig zagging between all these bullets isn't that easy.

Probably the best designed boss of the whole game

Even so, Xatax still remains a pretty boring and uneventfull game. Every level, regardless of Episode (the game has three), begins in the same spacey void with nothing in it, and all the levels take place between a mass of near identical pillars and blocky shapes sticking out of some mechanical space surface that you periodicaly fly through, with the environment never realy changing (this sort of makes the subtitle of Episode 2, "Mutant Wastelands" an absolute lie as you don't see any mutants or wastelands in the entiere thing). The game doesn't even change the enemies between episodes significantly, and there's maybe one added feature per episode (Episode II ads an electric current you have to turn off by blowing the obvious fuse box thing sticking out of it, Episode III adds platforms that turn into enemies eventualy.....into the same enemies you faced in Episode I and they're so slow with transforming that you've usualy long left the general area where they might fly into you), and these are minor and not that well executed.

Pictured: every level of Xatax, ever.

Not even the bosses realy manage to spice things up, as the developers decided to only have two per Episode, aka one each four levels, plus almost all the bosses look and act virtualy the same, they're a torso, not much bigger then your ship, with a couple of turrets and one or two moving gun tails attached to the back, sometimes with something that looks like a head attached to the front. They never attack in any other way then by shooting their turrets at you, and you never have any other option then to just systematicaly blow up all the turrets, after which they die. The last boss is the only exception, as his turrets are indestructible and you have to hit the eyeball shaped thing that opens up in the center, while avoiding bullets, but this isn't realy that hard to do and he goes down real quick.

In the end, you can't even continualy play through all three episodes in a row like with other games, instead having to restart from scratch every time you finish an episode, and the ending you get after beating Episode III is a tiny paragraph much shorter then the endings of both previous episodes, or the several page long-game plot you can view on the title screen. There's realy not much to say about this title in the end, because if you've played one level you've played all 18 of them *.


* Minus the 6 shorter boss levels