“Hey, if you want to, you can use my -1 price skill.“
“No, thank you, not gonna buy anything else. Do you need mine?”
“No, thank you.”
“OK.”
Overview
Xenoshyft: Onslaught is a deck-building game with a Starship Trooper theme: you build up your forces of space marines opposing a never-ending horde of alien bug monsters. Between the waves of enemy attack, you buy troops, armor, weapon, equipment, and decide where to place your troops and how to equip them.
The game plays a bit like tower defence: there is a fixed lane where the enemies approach, and you deploy your troops opposite to them. For some reason, your troops are in single-line formation. Combat happens sequentially, each player fights their own fights, with one troop-vs-monster fight at a time.
These 1v1 fights are the core of the game. The winner is determined by health and damage statistics, plus the various special abilities. Your cards might let you do damage before the fight even starts, bombard the back lines, heal your wounded soldiers, etc. The bugs also have their own special abilities. Some make their brethren stronger, others have annoying mind-control skills, and others simply punch your poor unprepared militia into oblivion.
If you run out of troops before killing all the enemies on your lane, the rest damages your base. And if you survive 9 waves of onslaught without them destroying the base, you win the game. Easy-peasy.
The Good
Most of what’s good about Xenoshyft: Onslaught is the first impression, which is important, but as it turns out, it’s not everything…
Looks Cool… at First Sight
Yes, at first blick, the game looks slick. Something I would have loved as a kid. You have 8 different versions of space marine dudes to recruit, each looks more badass than the other. Well, they all look more badass than the militia. You have lots of equipment options, 24 to be precise, and you only use 9 in any game, which keeps things fresh for a while.
Enemies also look interesting and intimidating. You might think that you have seen everything, and giant insect-like aliens in a game can’t surprise you anymore, but I have to admit, they look cool at first.
Building your deck up for the first 3-5 games is satisfying, and it’s fun to look forward to the big, powerful troops you get to buy in the late game.
The Bad
Sadly, that’s where the list of things we enjoyed about Xenoshyft end. The game is full of balance issues, there are bad production choices, and, worst of all, there is no meaningful strategy for the players.
Engine Failure
With a deck-building game, everything depends on your engine. Is it satisfying to build up, and does it offer meaningful choices along the way?
Sadly, the answer to both questions is ‘No’.
I think the source of the trouble is that Xenoshyft has implemented too many changes to the good old-fashioned default deck-building recipe:
- The game ends too quickly. There are only 9 rounds, which is simply not enough to shape your deck, and it feels very rushed. Your engine never really kicks off, and you don’t cycle through your cards enough times to feel the power.
- You know the classic conundrum in Dominion, when you have to decide if you want to buy score cards that will mean your future turns will be worse because your deck becomes cluttered with them? That issue is completely missing from Xenoshyft. Every 3 waves you get access to more powerful cards, but you can simply burn the low level cards from your deck. You simply sell your low-level militia to gain access to more powerful dudes, and you can convert your resource cards to more efficient ones.
- The cards you buy get added to your hand instantly. No more boring planning for the future I guess!
It really feels like the training wheels never come off. Like it’s a particularly nasty tutorial level, which is for some reason boring AND really difficult to win at the same time.
Balance Issues
Based on our experience, Xenoshyft is either unwinnable or it is a slugfest. In both cases, the end is very anticlimactic. And worst of all, it doesn’t feel like it’s you who’s making the difference.
Whether you can win the game or not almost entirely depends on randomly generated stuff:
- the special abilities you randomly get, there is at least one of them that is borderline useless (looking at you, Barracks);
- the available equipment (I calculated an almost 4% chance of not drawing any weapons, good luck winning those games!);
- the order of the attacking monsters – you can mitigate this to a certain extent, but you can still get unlucky and get wrecked instantly.
Perhaps the worst offender though is the boss monsters. As the name suggests, these are powerful enemies, designed to mess you up. The issue is that their appearance in the enemy deck is (once again) completely random. Heck, they might even not show up at all, at least in a two-player game! Which makes those victories feel kinda unearned…
Reading
The usual lazy game design issue is very strong with this one. There is no clever iconography, everything is painstakingly written out in detail, and since every troop, equipment, or monster does something very specific and unique, this becomes tiring soon.
Another issue is that as different overrides and sub-rules and stuff you are supposed to count slowly but surely pile up, it becomes near impossible to keep track of everything. I feel like it’s very unlikely that you ever play a game where you don’t make any mistakes.
As an additional confusion source, the rules are badly written. Let me clarify. They might technically be “not wrong”, but there is just something odd about the way they are phrased. You can never be sure that stuff like “heal 1 damage” or “combat” or “unit” means what you think it means. You know, stuff like do you reveal unrevealed enemies when you damage them through other means? And I know I’m not alone with this, look at this very impressive, massive FAQ on BoardGameGeek.
Production Quality
Two issues here.
In certain areas, the game is ridiculously overproduced, a lot of the components are pointless. For example, during every game, you select 9 equipment types. For some reason, there is a cardboard tile with the border that marks where to place the 9 corresponding decks. But you might as well just use the table. It’s not like their position matters. Same with the troops, I am capable of placing a maximum of 4 troops in a straight line, I don’t need a separate insert for that.
Yeah, I might be a bit unfair here, it’s certainly not something I would mention in a game I otherwise like. I’m pretty sure Spirit Island has the same issue and yet it didn’t bother me there. Oh well, it’s my subjective review. Moving on.
On the other hand, there are not enough tokens to keep track of health and abilities, not even for a two-player game. The cards are not well designed, they are difficult to read, the font choice is bad.
Oh, and a personal pet peeve of mine: the terrible insert. I don’t know how difficult it can be to have an insert for a standard card game, for some reason, what the game comes with is not useful in either storing the cards or in speeding up the game.
The Co-Op
Co-op in Xenoshyft is terrible, you all fight your own independent fights. You can occasionally help each other out, but otherwise, the shared health of the base is your only connection.
It’s also quite boring to wait for the other player to finish their turn, because you are not invested at all, and it’s impossible to keep track of what’s going on on the other side of the table.
The Recommendation
Nope.
If you want a good game with a similar theme: me too, do let me know if you run into any.
As for the endless horde of enemies you have to keep at bay: Ghost Stories has a very different setting, but I think the escalation and the strategy are much tighter and better designed.
Info
| Release Year | 2015 |
| Genre | Deck Building, Tower Defense |
| Difficulty | Hard |
| Number of Players | 1 to 4 |
| Length | 1 hour |
Rating
| Overall | Bad |
| Story | Mediocre |
| Co-Operation | Terrible |