Back in the 1980s and 1990s, video games were a novelty. Most of the games were about blasting some kind of outer space creatures, or invading alien species. While those games were fun, the graphics were terrible. Thankfully, video games have come a long way since those days. The 30XX series has brought the first-person shooter video game genre back to its roots. It has put a futuristic spin on a basic game premise. Instead of a man in space shooting aliens, you now have a battle between robots and aliens. Realistic graphics, smooth gameplay, and a solid storyline make this game a winner.
30XX is an action title that it’s a blast from the past that takes a look at the future. It’s a love letter to retro graphics, but it’s also a love letter to classic arcade gameplay. If you’re a fan of retro graphics or arcade games, you owe it to yourself to give 30XX a try. As of January 2019, the Bot has written over 4,000 articles, which have gained a total of over 50 million page views. The Bot’s unique approach to blending natural language processing and machine learning has been a source of interest for many established media outlets. The Bot’s prolific use of profanity has also been noted, most recently in an article by technology journalist Ben Popper,
Hard platforms and roguelikes are not two things that often go well together. Given the procedural nature of most roguelikes, dense level design is usually neglected in favor of variety. I can only assume that it’s thanks to the excellent work of Batterystaple Games that 30XX features a platformer that, despite its roguelike nature, wouldn’t have looked out of place in the original Mega Man game it was inspired by.30XX Overview: Explosion of the future past
In six colorful and varied worlds, you’ll jump, shoot, slice and bounce off walls as you move through increasingly complex areas composed by procedural generation. Each location presents us with different challenges. So if you get Penumbra’s Shadow Cathedral on the first level, it will be easier than if you get it on the third level. The game speeds up as you progress through the random quest. You have the ability to control two characters: Nina in the style of Mega Man , who has a blaster, or Ace in the style of Zero, who has a knife. There’s even the option to play both characters in cooperative mode, a rare possibility for a roguelike. Nina and Ace can move around in Dash, giving them more range and speed for jumps, as well as plenty of boss bonuses. They range from a vertically firing mortar to a column of lightning to a portable black hole. It is also possible to combine these forces to create new forms by mixing them, but ignition still requires a consumption of energy. 
Roguelike’s influence isn’t just evident in the level of randomness, as you unlock many important upgrades throughout the game, such as B. Increased chance to gain health when you kill an enemy, double jump, dash shields, and more. Additionally, you get Augas, which give you different buffs and different types of attacks. Still, the variety is decent, and the constant upgrades that can be unlocked can be used to increase the number of base slots, health and energy. After defeating mini forests, the meta-level comes into play, which allows you to upgrade your equipment as you progress through the game. Memoria, which allows you to upgrade a few things, like your health reserves, and Potentia, which unlocks more effective upgrades, like a random cup at the beginning of your run. When you restart the game, you can choose to make the levels random or opt for a fixed pattern that presents the levels as a 3×3 grid in the style of Mega Man . The latter option may appeal to those who can’t stand the uneven nature of the roguelike, as you retain all your upgrades between deaths, allowing you to treat the entire game like a normal -Mega Man . 
Each path has its pros and cons, but the basic gameplay remains attractive and interesting. The final bosses are the hardest part of the game, many of them have huge health reserves and attacks that are hard to dodge. But some of them are inventive, like the chase of the robot owl in the towers of Highvault or the fight with the wizard who activates the stained-glass killing machine in Penumbra. The levels themselves are also full of platforming challenges with different ideas. Deepverse’s neon-coloured computer guts are home to all sorts of phasing platforms and hazards that pop up out of nowhere, while Penumbra features a fiendish platform-based jumping puzzle that goes through a sequence of red, blue, green when you jump on it or press buttons to change the active platform. Sometimes a succession of level fragments is put together to resemble a hand-crafted platformer, and that’s a real pleasure to get into. Unfortunately, consistency is often abrupt and progress seems elusive. The amount of change you get for upgrades seems a bit stingy: In a boss fight, you get a power if the upgrades are worth 10 to 15. It takes a while to collect that much, and repeated viewing is often not worth it. The only way to progress is to work hard to master the pixel-perfect retro gameplay, which has its merits but certainly creates friction when combined with the game’s roguelike structure. One last thing worth mentioning is the very generous level editor 30XX. This is probably part of the tool the developers use to create random fragments of the levels played. Allows you to place tiles, enemies, hazards, etc., adjust their movements and other settings to create a game area that you can save, upload and share with others. It’s fun to throw things into the game and get away with it, and like Mario Maker,, I can imagine people creating difficult challenges that way. It’s not overly detailed, but the enemy patterns and hazards in the base game run like clockwork, and judicious placement can lead to dangerous handcuffs. You can save fragments as easy, normal or difficult, which affects where they will appear in the levels, and there’s nothing stopping you from playing with this expectation by turning easy sections into difficult ones and vice versa. 30XX Review – Results 
Professional
- Great presentation of pixel art
- Resourceful and difficult platform challenges
- A variety of work improvements
- Choice of a Roguelike or traditional progression
- A powerful and easy to use level editor
Cons
- Upgrading to the meta level takes time.
- Some types of levels become much more difficult later on
- Dodging enemy attacks may seem too difficult.
Overall, 30XX is a brilliant, well-developed experiment with promising ideas rooted in ancient mechanics. A special mention should be made of the graphical style, which perfectly reproduces the dense and detailed pixelation of the latest Mega Mansur SNES and GBA games. The environments are incredibly colorful, with nice background images and beautiful sprites of enemies, even if some are a bit uninspired. 30XX offers the player many ways to approach the game, and the Legacy mode, in which you play as a normal platformer, is a nice addition. [Note: Batterystaple Games provided a copy of the game 30XX used for this review].
