Eisenhorn: XENOS Reviews

Many People are stating, that the Graphics of this Game are outdated. That’s true. But for a small Studio with limited Capacities, and with a Price tag lower than 15€, the Game delivers an Audio and Video Quality that can compare with Titles like Mass Effect 1 (with a minor Advantage for Mass Effect, I think). Unfortunately you are forced to use a Controller (recommended, if you are familiar with it) or an unalterable Key binding for the Keyboard and Mouse, but that is something you will be able to handle with after some time. You should know, that the Game is designed as a RPG instead of an Adventure Game as it is stated at the Store Page, because you will have to follow defined Paths which you can’t left, you have to fight sometimes, and you have to watch several Cut scenes as in any other RPG too. Exploring and investigating is only a very small Part of the Game. With the good Story, delivered by the Book “Eisenhorn: Xenos” by Dan Abnett, this Game is not as bad as many People have stated in their Reviews. But …. I can’t recommend the Game in its current state of Development, because the Game Mechanics, the Combat System and countless minor Problems have left me behind with a huge scale of Anger. Freezes while moving, missed Triggers for Story related Events, and a very strange Combat Mechanic makes the Game with a great Story to the most unwelcome Game I have played for at least five years. I will not say, that it is bad at all, but there is no Fun if you have to repeat difficult Parts of the Game for five, six, seven Times, because you can’t proceed forward due to a Bug with a broken Trigger or Animation (broken Animations caused the very most of my problems - Freezes). I could give you a hind for nearly every of its 30 Chapters, how to avoid Bugs or how to solve Problems if you got caught, but it wouldn’t give you the feeling that is needed to enjoy a Game. Therefore I recommend to avoid a Purchase of this Game. You will not become happy with it, because the Problems aren’t related to your System and Equipment, they are related to the Game itself. And they will happen without any doubt. Finally this Game will give you a feeling of wasted hours and Money, even with its very good Story. In my Opinion, there is more than a Patch needed to make the Game to a Product, which can fulfill the Expectations of Fans of the Eisenhorn Series and/or the Warhammer 40.000 Universe, and there is more than a Patch needed to bring me back to this Game and its Developers.

[h1]Mark Strong is the voice of Eisenhorn![/h1] [b]You're better off buying the books than wasting your hard earned money on this game.[/b] The game has many problems and A LOT of negative reviews on Steam. However I tried to go into this game with a positive attitude. Imagine my surprise when I found out that Mark Strong is the voice of Eisenhorn and that he's also a narrator. I am surprised they were able to get him. Kevin Spacey was used as the selling point for Advanced Warfare. They should have done the same with Mark Strong and this title. Would have sold more copies. However I am glad they didn't. Needless to say the voice acting in this game is good. That's pretty much where all the "pros" of this game end and we can move on to the "cons". I should mention that since the game is based on the epic book trilogy "Eisenhorn" then the story itself isn't exactly bad either. However it isn't very well presented. You cannot enjoy the story because of the many problems this title has. If you're interested in the 40K universe or you're looking for a dark sci-fi story then you're better off buying the books than wasting your hard earned money on this game. First thing you'll notice is that the graphics are outdated. This may be because it's a mobile port. That's no excuse for a PC game tho. The game looks like it released in 2007. Graphics don't make a good game tho, ye? So let us dig even deeper into the game. I was using my trustworthy Xbox 360 controller. As soon as I got control over my character the game told me to use the right stick to move the character and my left stick to move the camera. That was a lie. Left stick moves the character and right stick moves the camera. [b]The game doesn't know it's own control schemes![/b] It gets even "better" tho. You cannot rebind keys/change the control schemes which on PC or even on consoles is pretty much unforgivable nowadays. Your character can get stuck on corners easily. You can get stuttering out of nowhere. The combat and character movements feel clunky and there's an annoying delay. You have to use evade before you have to use evade. When you're about to get hit you have to use the A button to evade. You have to do that before you're about to get hit tho because there's a good 2-3 second delay to your actions. The combat itself is very simplistic: X to hit, Y to shoot, A to evade. That's it. No combos, no nothing. The level design is poor and tries to mock you: "Look! You can have different pathways to your goal." - A lie. Sometimes you can go up, straightforward or down and straightforward. No secrets, no items, no enemies, no different scenery. You can look up and see the same platforms or look down. It's literally the same pathway...They tried to create an illusion but failed at doing so. The game is very linear. More linear than any Call of Duty game i've ever played. Every time you kill an enemy you get coins. You can use those coins to upgrade your sword and pistol in the upgrade "station" (just a yellow dot on a floor you can interact with). First upgrade requires 2000 coins and the first "upgrade station" appears when you only have like 700 coins or so. By the time I reached the 4th upgrade station I still had less than 2000 coins. What's the point?!?! I'll list all the cons. [b][u]CONS[/u][/b] 1. Outdated graphics 2. Bad animations 3. Cannot rebind keys 4. Clunky and repetitive combat 5. Delay to your actions 6. Random stuttering 7. Boring level design that doesn't make any sense 8. Very linear [b][u]PROS[/u][/b] 1. Voice Acting 2. Story [b]DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY ON THIS GAME Get the book trilogy instead[/b]

First of all, to enjoy this game one must meet some criteria: 1. Able remember a day when a game was not judged by the size of its empty sandbox *cough*phantom pain*cough* 2. Accept that the game is linear and meant to tell a specific story. This is effectively an interactive memoir. 3. Love 40K. This game is spot on with the architechure and attitudes for most of the characters. 4. This isn't mass effect, the witcher, batman arkham, or dark souls. If you compare small studio games to the triple A's you will constanly be let down. All that said, if you aren't a fan of the Warhammer 40k or maybe even Mark Strong, I do not recomend the game. The gameplay is rough, the graphics sub par, and due to it being based on the first part of trilogy one could feel let down in the end. Make no mistake, this game was made for the fans who are drawn forward by the lore. But even for fans, buy it on sale. Its pretty short and flawed mechanically. And pray to the Emperor that they finish the trilogy with some lessons learned.

Full disclosure: As a fan of the original book series, I have to say that I am a little bit biased. At the bottom will be a tl;dr. More can be found here, I ran out of space in this: https://gameknightly.com/reviews/review-eisenhorn-xenos/ I love Warhammer 40k, everything about it. That is why I still wanted to play this game after seeing the score, I suppose I had hope, when I really shouldn't in this Grimdark universe, where no one can make good 40k game anymore. The game is based off of the first Eisenhorn novel, Xenos, and really just should have been a movie. The game is absolutely terrible. The camera moves badly, at all times, not just for combat. In combat it wants to try to lock onto the closest enemy, even when that will screw you over royally. Then there is the problem that the camera is zoomed in way, way too close, further making not just combat but the whole game unenjoyable. The movement is terrible, especially when they force you to walk in the worst places like on your ship, wasting time. There is no way to turn off the terrible motion blur, and I found myself getting somewhat sick as I spun Gregor around to try and fight. Combat is boring, a chain hit system just using swords, and ranged weapons are useless. You get a total of 6 shots, and the enemies all roll and dodge every one. Also, why is everyone using power swords? Why does Gregor use his power sword (when it is turned on) to pry open doors? Don't the people who made this game know how rare they are, or how they work? Didn't they even read the book this is based on? The sound effects used are from websites where you can get them for free, or from games a decade old, and are used in so many that when I heard them in this I was directly taken out of the atmosphere, and that is really the only thing this game has going for it, the atmosphere. Staying on sound, the voice acting is awful. You do have a range in this game, from absolutely amazing (Eisenhorn) to sadly uninspired (almost every other speaking role) to absolutely terrible (Lores, Alizebeth, Fischig). As you go through the game it really just feels like people are speaking the lines from the book, completely uncaring about the job they are doing, or the context in which they are supposed to be saying it in. Hoping that the rest of the gameplay will make up for the combat? Then you are sorely mistaken. What they have instead of a game is annoying quick time events, platforming, avoiding environmental hazards (steam, lasers, jets of flame, etc) a terribly implemented stealth system, and uninspired hacking/psyker minigames. Did I mention that you hack devices with your auspex? The only time they actually use the auspex kind of correctly is when you use it to try to see where you need to go, or who to talk to, (and this is unintentional, I had to do it) because the game will hide ladders, vents, characters, essentially everything, in dark corners or areas where you would least expect them. This only breeds frustration and contempt at how bad the level design in this game is. It seems like they wanted this to be something like a movie/game hybrid, and like I mentioned before just making it into a movie would have been way better, but then you actually get to the cutscenes, and marvel at how bad they are for a game that focuses so much on them. The animations are terrible, the characters jerk and jank around, and the cinematography is just awful. The lip syncing is exactly what you would expect from people who don't care at all, and the models and textures sometimes don't even appear. When I finally confronted Oberon I was confused, because Gregor kept looking down at an empty patch of cobblestones. This happened on and off throughout the game, but it was at that point, when he never showed up throughout the whole scene, that I finally went a little crazy. Add to that the fact that the flames and other effects look like they were borrowed from Turok 2 or from another game from that era; they honestly look twenty+ years old. This is all on high graphics mind you, with the best settings on, and with a top of the line computer. Then there are other areas where they were just plain lazy. For example, you almost always start each mission (and many cut scenes) on a landing pad in a new area. However, you never see the ship dropping you off or picking you up. You also never see explosions, like when the room on Hubris detonated. It was a fade to black with an explosion sound. I could go on with these things, and I don't understand why these sorts of things were done. It makes them seem cheap and lazy. The thing is though, that they do pay close attention to a lot of things. They make the world come alive, and the backgrounds and atmosphere are great. The settings are amazing, and everything looks cool and is in the great Warhammer 40k style that I love. They even have paintings and portraits in houses and manors that utilize images that GW uses for fluff. Here they became lazy again, because now you have people like Maxilla (not a cultist like the Glaws) with pictures of daemons and the Death Guard up on their walls, where I would assume hanging that sort of material would get you a death sentence, or at least an interrogation and a flogging as to why heretical materials are being used for decoration. They ruin their perfectly good settings however by changing them to better suit the terrible gameplay. Why would an Adeptus Mechanicus hub, where 12,000 of the planet's richest most noble people go to cryo-sleep through the winter, have floors that are falling apart, or corridors that turn into platforms? No reason other than to support the crappy gameplay, so that you don't get too bored chasing a terribly voiced and accented Eyeclone down an endless number of identical hallways. Another thing that is boring? The music. It was so bland and uninspired that I didn't even hear it until I consciously asked myself where it was and started to pick it up. Other Warhammer games have amazing soundtracks, or at least music that stands out a little, but this stuff blends in so much you might as well not even be listening to it, and play the track from DoW1. The character customization is a laugh, where you collect coins (seriously, the currency is just called 'coins' rather than thrones or gelt, or even just credits), to slightly upgrade your melee weapon, your ranged weapon, or a trinket that mildly boosts your stats. You can do the same for an ally who will fight alongside you in combat, but the AI is terrible, don't rely on them at all. Seriously, they act retarded. I don't mean to be offensive, but that is literally the impression I got from the AI, and not just your allies. The enemy also has no sense of tactics, and just charge you and try to kill you with sheer weight of numbers while the ranged guys in the back pick you off. I finally decided to stop playing when I got stuck in a hallway between two doors that wouldn't let me out no metter what I did, with nothing to hack to let me out. I looked up gameplay footage, the door is supposed to just open, mine glitched out, so screw it, I am done. tl;dr- Pros: -Great atmosphere -Diverse and beautiful settings/locations -Amazing story Cons: -Combat is terrible, gets stale and boring, ranged is useless -Camera/character controls are terrible -Music is bland and boring -Motion blur cannot be turned off -Settings in general can barely be changed -Even on the highest quality level, models and textures look terrible, and have a chance of just disappearing -Cutscenes and the animations are badly done, lip syncing is horrific -The voice acting for everyone other than the protagonist is just sad, and turns great characters into bricks -Sound effects are from freebie website collections and old games -Regular gameplay is annoying or gimmick minigames/quicktime events -Level design is terrible, navigation is awful -Boring character customization Just read the books and save your money.

People are right: this game has issues. the camera movement is rubbish, the art is outdated, voice over is only decent for Eisenhorn, combat is terrible, stealth is tolerable, but the camera is terrible. Plus there are a lot of minor issues (textures) Yet I cannot stop playing. As a fan of the books I just got hooked into it again. Also the music is really helping to establish the athmospere. This is a solid A game form 5 years ago. This is a bad game now. I know what happens next and still want to see it and hear it. I will finish it. I am a 40K fanboy who reads HH every day for an hour in the metro and plays with even the most rubbish of 40K games. I cannot deny who I am. The Emperor protects.

I tried so hard to enjoy this game , the visuals and atmosphere are very nice and immersive but any time there is a gun shot ( ive heard air rifles with far more convincing bang ) or anyone speaks that is not Eisenhorn there is a clear lack of love and your immersion and warhammer boner will shrivel faster than your genitals after jumping into a bath of ice. I think I will just buy the books and Give Dan Abnett my money instead , and I would urge you to do the same as your imagination would probably build more convincing and likeable characters. The weapons are rediculous when compared to the fluff . a bolt pistol does less damage than a auto revolver used by imperial Guard , and the las pistol can only hold 12 shots and takes about 6 of those to kill a man in cloth / leather tank tops.

Eisenhorn: Xenos is a very special kind of game which is most definitely not aimed at the general public. Once and foremost, it is an interactive retelling of a Warhammer 40K book. That's what it ultimately is, not only in its core but in its entirety. This leads to two problems. 1. The entire gameplay is just filler material to progress the story and the gameplay which is in there is probably only in there to not have made it a walking simulator with cutscenes. 2. The fact that there was zero focus on actual gameplay shows massively in the form of very half-baked mechanics. If you are interested in Eisenhorn, be ready to play only to progress the story and to get annoyed by very dodgy combat and stealth mechanics. Be also ready about hit and miss voice-acting. Some of it awe inducing, some of it so awful that it is mainly inducing cringeworthy mental pain. Most of the writing is taken close to literally from the book Xenos and this is both a blessing and a curse: The parts which are copypaste are absolutely amazingly written, most parts that are not, are massively lacking in impact. On the technical side it's wonky too, being a mobile port, but to me it looked reasonably well on 4k with everything cranked up to the maximum. The main selling point are the story and the atmosphere after all and those are spot on. Everything looks as if you would have imagined it, sometimes even better and more grandiose. The feeling of the Warhammer 40K universe is absolutely perfectly conveyed and this is what the entire project mainly was about. I, personally, had a lot of fun with Eisenhorn: Xenos, being a Warhammer 40K fan. At the time of playing I had not actually read the books, but I ended up getting them because I was so amazed by the fantastic writing. And oh boy was it worth it. I really do hope that the other two (soon to be three with Magus) books get digital adaptations as well. Judging the game as a game, it's a shoddy game appealing to diehard fans at best. Judging the game as an interactive book, it's amazing. I'm going to do the latter and hope that if there will be a game for the second of three (soon to be four) books as well, it'll do a better job in regard to mechanics. I can't technically recommend this to everyone, but I simply refuse to downvote a product I personally had an amazing time with, as even with all its flaws, it did manage to entertain me a great deal. So this isn't for everyone, but a must have for people who enjoy stories over gameplay.

I love 40k, but it pains me to see constantly a lot of bad games from the license from devs that clearly don't quite know what they are doing. A lot of the voice acting is really sub par and distracting which is bad for such a story focused game, and when it isn't is giving you moments of cheap and hard to dodge hazards, terrible animations, and combat that comes down to spamming left click when you have a single enemy to deal with because you stunlock them, or alternitively the rest of the enemies all attack you, and stunlock you to death, which is made worse that the combat is pretty unresponsive, as in press the dodge button, but you are locked into an attack animation for the next second. When it comes out on mobile, maybe it will be like $3, pick it up then, not now and not on PC because it really gains nothing, and the aspects of it being put on mobile eventually bring everything down.

It's difficult to give this a thumbs up or down. For the price point, it's OK. The combat can sometimes be janky. The characters aren't fleshed out enough. The pop in textures are aggravating like with any Unreal game. But what this game DOES HAVE GOING FOR IT. The maps can be very interesting in detail. The narration is spot on. The sound direction isn't half bad. It's a very simple story driven action title for $20 when it isn't on sale. Too many of the thumbs down crowd are holding really high expectations. I didn't even realize this game existed until 2 days before it's launch. I got what I paid for. I'm content. If you want a 40K experience that's slightly different from what you're accustomed to and don't mind the lack of polish. Get it.

Why on Earth did they target the glory of Gregor towards mobile devices. Gregor deserves the full high fidelity and potential depth that a PC / Console release would demand. Eisenhorn deserved better. At least the books won't let me down like this does. Edit: I should justify this negative review. 1. Controls are irritating 2. AI is stupid 3. Gameplay is repetitive (as you'd expect from a mobile --> PC port) 4. The level of detail clipping is VERY apparent (2k + max settings) 5. The AA is very poorly done 6. Models and animations are low quality 7. Textures would be pretty, but the LOD wankness kills it 8. The ambient effects (water, steam, rain) is rubbish 9. Level Design is mediocre 10. The novels provide such depth of story and visual description it is amazing that the title has gone ad-hoc in some cases for the sake of creating an 'interesting level' For what it is (a mobile game) it is excellent, it is what you'd expect; but publishing it on PC may have been a mistake.