30XX by developer and publisher Batterystaple
Games—PC
Review written by Pierre-Yves
with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Set a thousand years
down
the line from 20XX, 30XX sees the return of Nina and
Ace for all of your fast paced, single player or coop, roguelike
challenged platforming needs! Having just released in
Early
Access, there's already a fair bit to challenge
yourself on through two separate modes.
The first of these modes is the Standard Mode which has a more
“classic” feel to it in which you either do or die through a
series of random AND randomly generated stages. The second mode, Mega
Mode, is a bit more forgiving as you not only get to pick which stage
you want to try to tackle, but you also get to keep making yourself
tougher each time without the risk of losing it all and starting back
from zero every time.
In either mode though, you’ll be able to acquire / purchase two
types of upgrades. The first, augments, allow you to increase your
base attack power, movement speed, maximum health (while in effect),
jumping height, and so on. In a neat twist at times, some of these
upgrades are double edge swords as while an augment can speed you up
and make you lighter to move faster and jump further, it’ll
decrease your attack. So a bit of balancing is required as what’s
the point in moving around stupid fast if you can’t actually take
out your enemies at the same time.
The other type of upgrades are more permanent “account” based
ones that will translate between the two modes. While augments can be
found in the classic, you lose them on death. In the more lenient
mode, you can buy them for bolts, this world’s currency, and
they’ll be in effect making you quite the force to be reckoned
with. As for the more permanent upgrades however, these come at a
much higher cost requiring you to beat stage bosses in order to
obtain the materials required and they may not always drop the
material that you are looking for. It’s a good thing that 30XX is
all about the challenge and racing through to repeatedly tackle these
bosses under different circumstances.
Gameplay overall is fairly solid bringing that faster paced Mega Man
X style back again while we keep getting radio silence from Capcom.
Either Nina or Ace (X or Zero really), can run, jump, dash, wall
jump, slide down walls and get power ups from defeated bosses.
Kicking things up notch are the above mentioned Augment and Upgrade
Systems that can change your gameplay for the better or the worse
depending on what these upgrades do such as reducing the distance of
your shots for a closer more shotgun-like spread. If you don’t like
that one though you can always turn it off which was great.
All of the above said though, if you don’t find the current level
of challenges enough, if the random layouts of each stage is just not
doing it for your level of challenge / you’re that hardcore type of
person that REALLY wants to be challenged, there are options for
that! Side to all of the upgrades, if there’s something that you
want to spice up such as making levels longer, making the environment
and enemies do more damage to you, making things more expensive or
putting yourself on a timer that if it runs out you get poisoned
until you die, then these are definitely items to experiment with.
Summary
Otherwise, there’s still plenty of content to come as several
bosses and their stages are not yet in place. I’m looking forward
to seeing what comes next as 30XX is shaping up to be as good as its
predecessor 20XX in a void where we aren’t really getting any new
Mega Man games especially within the X Series.
Score: N/A
