Xevious
System: NES
Release Date: September 1988
Developer: Namco
Publisher: Bandai
Genre: Shoot ‘em Up
Oh, hey, look, another shoot ‘em up team up between Namco and Bandai released in September 1988… Xevious. Wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. I wasn’t pleasantly surprised. This is a vertical scroller. You’re a ship that has two different attacks. You can press the B Button to shoot at flying enemies with missiles. The A Button drops bombs on the grounded enemies.
The levels are an exercise in frustration. There aren’t any powerups or anything! It’s just shoot and avoid bullets. I just did this in Galaga. There are just better graphics here. Some enemies fly on screen and sometimes they shoot you, other times they don’t. Shoot them quickly to be safe, but good luck, as the ground domes will shoot at you, as well. Try to take them out quickly. The air missiles can be shot very quickly, but there can only be one bomb on screen at a time.
I was getting irritated, thinking I kept dying before beating level one, but on further inspection, I made it to level five out of sixteen. The hit detection seemed off. The bullets were as quick, if not quicker than my ship. You have to score points to get the extra lives you’ll inevitably need. The best I got was about 50,000 points, but I didn’t have the patience to try for more.
Graphics: 1.0
The graphics aren’t good, but at least they made some backgrounds.
Sound: 0.0
The music that played was so incredibly annoying, my wife started yelling at me to turn the sound off. I gladly complied.
Gameplay: 1.0
I don’t think the gameplay is very advanced. They could have done so much more.
Difficulty: 1.0
Once you memorize the maps, you will just get annoyed by random shots.
Fun Factor: 0.5
I didn’t enjoy myself while playing this and had much frustration, instead.
Overall Grade: 0.7
Xevious earns a D-. This is a bad game. There are so many better vertical scrolling shoot ‘em ups to play by now.