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Xion - awesome and original retro shooter

RuneSR2
Grand Champion
A few days ago this game arrived:

https://youtu.be/8-UwNI9bD9c

https://www.oculus.com/experiences/rift/1868957053126430/

Intro according to the devs:
"Xion reVives the arcade and shoot'em ups of the 90's in a refreshing and unique rogue style and destructible voxel landscape setting!  Blast your way through multiple randomized levels!  EVERYTHING is destructible!  Design and build your own ship!  Defeat the big bad end-bosses of each level!" 


The game should perform just perfectly on most rigs:

    RECOMMENDED:
    • OS: Windows 10
    • Processor: Intel Core i5 4590 or AMD FX 8350 or greater
    • Memory: 6 GB RAM
    • Graphics: GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon R9 290 or better
    • Storage: 100 MB available space

Note that right now the game's just $10 in the Oculus Store, but $15 on Steam - maybe the game will be 50% more expensive in the Oculus Store shortly... $10 is a great price. 

My review from Oculus Store:

"Awesome game - perfect performance
Great retro shooter, but still very original. You've never tried anything like this before! In another review it said that this game felt like being inside a Commodore 64, and that's a nice description, but it's probably more like a Commodore Amiga, although none of these classic machine even remotely had the power to make a game like Xion. I was worried due to another review stating poor performance, but I could in absolutely no way reproduce this problem. Using Oculus Tray Tool this game performed at a perfect 90 fps even when forcing super sampling 2.0! And that was using the "beautiful" cpu preset and no anisotropic filtering and no MSAA. Then I tried to more or less max out the game by adding 4xMSAA and forcing anisotropic filtering - and whoa - I still got 90 fps with 30 to 40 % headroom! (Remember I'm still forcing super sampling 2.0.) It may make good sense - this game is voxel based, and you can shoot the terrain too. Thus this game may be cpu intensive (I've got a i7 7700K, 16GB 3200Mhz), but it's in no way GPU intensive - the game should work flawlessly on lower end rigs (I'm using heavily oc'ed GTX 1080). Actually few games are as optimized on the Rift as Xion. The game is great fun. You build your own ship and then shoot nearly everything that moves. Your right hand is your ship, so your ship follows your hand movements exactly. The left hand is used to monitor your health and to pick up items. The game works so much better than the great old arcade machine thanks to VR. Congrats to the devs for producing this flawless gem! PS. Should I criticize one thing, then it would be great with an option to change hands - I'm left handed :-)"

I rated the game 4 stars for the gameplay + 1 star for the awesome performance. 

I did read this review, which for days kept me from purchasing the game: 
"The bad. Serious performance hit on my machine 6600K, 16GB, 1080Ti. The first level is fine but it starts going downhill from there. Lots of stutter and dropped frames with default graphical settings set to "fastest". By the 3rd game is barely playable. Other games worked fine and tried rebooting but the stutter remains. Perhaps a memory leak or something as the start of the game seems fine. I'll check back after updates to see if this gets fixed."

As I've written in my review I could reproduce no of those problems - in fact, Xion is one of the best optimized games on the Rift. 

Some screenshots that don't do the game much justice - you simply cannot show VR as flat 2D images, sadly:

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Building your ship:
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Your ship (ok, not in the first level 😉
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Boss fight (large tank in the background, not easy to see):
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Paradise Decay has made a nice review of the game:

https://youtu.be/Bylq893iPgs

Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index & PSVR2, Asus Strix OC RTX™ 3090, i9-10900K (5.3Ghz), 32GB 3200MHz, 16TB SSD
"Ask not what VR can do for you, but what you can do for VR"

26 REPLIES 26

RuneSR2
Grand Champion
Maybe I worry too much - but it's been more than 2 weeks since Xion launched, and there're only 9 reviews in the Oculus Store. Maybe people don't like such shooters, or maybe these 9 reviews cover everything so no one wants to write another review - and maybe very few persons have tried this amazing game. 

If you like old retro-shooters and don't know how to spend this Saturday - give Xion a try  B) 

Maybe we're just too few users with way too much VR content to share. I can see than many of the new apps and games are very slow to pick up reviews, maybe I should give Attenborough's Hold the World a try later...  o:)

Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index & PSVR2, Asus Strix OC RTX™ 3090, i9-10900K (5.3Ghz), 32GB 3200MHz, 16TB SSD
"Ask not what VR can do for you, but what you can do for VR"

RuneSR2
Grand Champion
Xion is just $ 4.99 on Steam today:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/644420/Xion/

Personally I think it's sad to see devs having to more or less give their awesome VR games away for free - I don't know if the price is that low in the Oculus Store (it just say "Purchased" when I check the store page). Do support the developers if you like this sort of games! I own many $20+ VR games that impressed me far less than Xion. 

Oculus Rift CV1, Valve Index & PSVR2, Asus Strix OC RTX™ 3090, i9-10900K (5.3Ghz), 32GB 3200MHz, 16TB SSD
"Ask not what VR can do for you, but what you can do for VR"

Digikid1
Consultant
It is a great game. 

Rob_In_Phoenix
Rising Star
Wow, Minecraft meets Zaxxon.  A cool combination.  I believe I have Zaxxon for my C64.  Another reason to get that thing set up and running again.

Digikid1
Consultant
Goodness please don’t compare Minecraft to this. Unlike Minecraft THIS IS A GOOD GAME. 

The blocks are supposed to be pixels. 

Zenbane
MVP
MVP

Digikid1 said:

Goodness please don’t compare Minecraft to this. Unlike Minecraft THIS IS A GOOD GAME. 





Digikid1
Consultant

Zenbane said:


Digikid1 said:

Goodness please don’t compare Minecraft to this. Unlike Minecraft THIS IS A GOOD GAME. 







LOL. I just hate Minecraft with a passion. It amazes me how crappy games are adopted by so many people. It boggles the mind. 

/on topic

Has anyone beat the game yet?