Zotrix Reviews

I LOVE the music, this is the perfect game to play high! EDIT: Sadly this game is very buggy and the developers seems to have abandoned this game so I can no longer recomendit it.

Zotrix has a simple economy, not much story, and can be grindy and repetitive, but it is also is a casual, fun, mindless, easy to play game. Highly recommend on sale.

Thank god i bought this on sale, because honestly for 13$ there's many other indie games that are way better than Zotrix. It's not that bad, but certainly not good enough either.

This game has serious balancing issues. It is very easy to get overpowered gear very early in the game. This makes completing the game tedious and boring. The trading aspect of the game can be completely ignored. After finishing the first 10 to 15 missions there is not much more to upgrade and you'll basically have an endless supply of resources and money. Some of the upgrade items (the different missiles i.e.) and all the lower tier gear is completely obsolete. The story doesn't matter at all. It's just escort mission after escort mission. The enemy types and attack patterns repeat over and over again. When you are in the upgrade shop it is not possible to directly compare the items in the shop to the ones you have already installed. There are also still a few bugs in the game. Often when the last wave of a level is finished it takes one or two minutes of flying through empty space until the level finally ends. The basic idea of the game is very cool. It makes me sad to see so much wasted potential. This could easily be a really fun game if the developers fix the balancing, add some variety and give the player a reason to use trading. In the current state it's just a textbook example of game design gone wrong.

Fun game for about 5 hours then its really repetitive. After the first upgrade the challenge went away. You can work the resouces as you travel buying low where you are at and selling high where you are traveling to so credits become pointless after a while. I think this game should be $4.99 or less just due to the replay value being very low.

It's a short game. 5-15 min active shooting missions...old school asteroids style (where you move around the screen) with old time streams of enemies coming through shooting. Can upgrade ship, shields, etc. Has a trading component, that isn't really necessary considering, but nice touch. Plot line ok, as it gives direction.

The current state of the game does not support Xbox controllers well. For strange reasons the game requires a lengthy gamepad calibration the first time you activate the Xbox controller in game. The calibration stage is cumbersome yet producing bad calibration results, and it is impossible to steer and aim in the game in any meaningful way. Bad impression regarding the gamepad controls, as I have yet to see a gamepad compatible game on steam that requires calibrations. Most games just work with gamepad right off the bat. Maybe the developer try to ensure precise aiming, by mapping the range of the twin sticks to the corners of the screen of the current frame size? Anyway, stay away from using gamepad for the moment before a fix is available. However, the graphics and sounds in game is pretty superb, albeit the in game dialogues can not be fast forwarded/skipped. If you do do that, please make an effort to make the dialogue brief, relevant, and interesting.

Horribly bland, boring, repetitive gameplay. Most upgrades do nothing to change the gameplay in any way. Enemies (randomly drawn, pixelated abstract shapes) move into the screen slowly, single-file, and require zero thought to be beaten down. This is the most mind-numbing experience I've ever gone through on my PC. To the developer: you earn no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.

This game is pretty good. Frustrating? Yes. Difficult. YES. In space? YES! The only thing I don't understand is the optimization of the particle effects. My CPU and GPU (i5 and the highest radeon series) are equipped to handle that stuff, yet I get severe lag when too many particles are on the screen, with a density of 20 parts/cm^2 or greater. I know, one can turn the particles down, or even off, but I don't need to. My computer can handle what the game is doing, but for some reason the game is way, way too taxing in terms of particle effects. One UI thing that bothered me was the fact that you can go to the resource trade menu from the equipment store menu, but not the other way around. It's nit-picky, but that's what critiques are about. The graphics are amazing, so I have no issues there. The music is one of my favorite parts of this game. I would list the artists here, but there is a metric ton of people behind the music design, relative to how small the game is. There are also sound bars that are present in the main menu and the starting screen. Each level begins with a (usually) different-than-the-last-one-heard soundtrack, with the title of said soundtrack appearing on the screen. Obviously this game had a big focus on sound quality. The gameplay is pretty much what this genre is all about; you fly a colorful collection of pixels around a black and white background, shooting squares at other collections of squares as they shoot squares back at you. The game features newtonian mechanics. For example, there is a pushback effect from shooting, which is actually pretty unique in 2D space shooters. The ship, however, just kind of stops. This is counter-intuitive, unless the ship has some kind of RCS that the player can't see, which is what I'm guessing. The innovation here is that it's a 2D space shooter with resource trading and upgrading. It's not a roguelike, like FTL. It isn't as huge and encouraging of exploration as in EVE online. It also isn't just some boring Galaga clone. It's some hybrid of those games. If you want to play a casual space shooter and feel an actual feeling of accomplishment after beating a level without ejecting out of your ship, play this.

On paper, this would be one of my favorite games. I love top-down arcade shooters, and resource trading/management, and upgrade loops. Zotrix has all of these things, and it does them all in a very mediocre way. The shooting, where you'll spend most of your time, is incredibly boring and easy. Enemies will slowly march onto the screen, single file, where you will immediately wipe them all out by firing in a straight line - even without any upgrades. As the game grows in difficulty (at a glacier pace), occasionally two lines of enemies will come out simultaneously, which means you might miss a few, so you'll get fewer credits at the end of the level. You're never really in danger, and you easily become disinterested. This is not how you should feel when you're alone in space against thousands of aliens. Resource trading is also devoid of complexity or meaningful choices. Different stations sell different resources at different prices - but you can preview the price of any resource of every station before making the trip, meaning that there is no decision making, no research, and no risk at all. You can expect a small (5-10%) profit every single time you make a jump. This adds absolutely nothing to the game. Upgrades are weird and usually trivial. It's hard to know what things do or why you'd need them. Nothing that I found changes the game at all; it's simply bigger numbers (more damage to a primary blaster cannon, etc). On top of all this, you'll find numerous quality-of-life annoyances throughout the entire game. There's no Sell All button in the resource trading, so you have to type in all the numbers by hand (also, no numpad support). Sound effects for shooting are obnoxiously loud, completely obscuring the music. English is likely not the developer's first language - you'll see numerous grammatical oddities. Et cetera. Zotrix is an unpolished, uninteresting game that does not even come close to its potential. Avoid.