X-Out: Resurfaced is the revival and a ground-up remake of the 1990 Amiga game X-Out, a horizontal shoot’em up that was set in an unconventional location, the ocean. X-Out: Resurfaced has new artwork and new music, but they’re all done in a way to mimic the original, but at a higher resolution and fidelity, respectively. This is a tough-as-nails shooter that has no modern accommodations, so be prepared to replay stages until they’re memorized, and take notes on the patterns of bosses. X-Out: Resurfaced stands as a remake for modern systems with retro sensibilities that you should pay attention to.
The game starts with you watching a short cutscene introducing you to the underwater crisis. After selecting the singleplayer mode, you’re given an unusual choice, designing a loadout. Thankfully in X-Out: Resurfaced you get three preconfigured loadouts to choose from, I found the most expensive and successful one for me to be “Trilobyte 3”. If you don’t want that option, you can build a custom loadout, but know you’re on a budget of 12,000 credits.
You’ll have four submarines to choose from: trilobyte, stingray, squid, and shark. Each has its own maneuvering capability, health, and room for attachments. From here you’ll select one of three canon types: heat, titanium, and uranium shot. Next you’ll select your automatic weapon: small, large, and extra large missiles, with bouncing bombs. Primary weapons are the electric arc, flamethrower, and fire lightning. Secondary weapons let you launch drones, shields, and smart bombs. Upgrades which come later, are the teuton laser or drone collector. Lastly are satellites (drones): fixed, vertical, mirror, and oval, to just name a few. If at any time something isn’t working for you, you can trash the item to recover credits. Many of the items are inaccessible from the start, but become available later. Once you’ve got everything dialed in, then you begin stage one.
Anyone who’s played Aqua Kitty – Milk Mine Defender will see a slight resemblance here as you navigate the underwater caverns. The gameplay itself is rather simple, just move, shoot, and dodge incoming projectiles. Depending on what you’ve got equipped, you’ll drop satellites to help you. One thing that is a standout from the normalcy in this genre is that you can speed up or slow down, but it isn’t the usual advancement of the screen. It’s actually speeding up your vehicle and how fast or slow it moves across the screen, having it serve as a sensitivity element really made some levels easier to navigate having granular control like this.
Being my first time playing this game, I really had trouble distinguishing between the foreground, midground, and background. I eventually got used to this, but I wasn’t quite ready for what this had in store for me. As I killed the robotic deep sea monsters, I worked to build up a fleet. Here you can have up to nine ships with your accrued funds. Each successive level complete means you are snowballing wins to make yourself more powerful and self-sufficient.
Though it’s not as easy as it seems. You have a health bar that can take some damage, but running into obstacles or losing all your health, and you’re back to the main menu. You start with only one life, and you have to do everything you can to protect it across the eight stages. If things get too hard, you could request the help of a friend and play in 2-player mode. If all else fails, there are cheat codes you can exercise. However you complete the game, there’s a mirror mode that flips things upside down for a whole new experience.
Achievements are a good way to introduce replayability and challenge that may not be present. Additionally, there’s desires to see you best high scores, and see if you can beat the game with wildly different loadouts. It’s not going to be a forever game, but it’ll be a wildly good time for as long as you give it.
X-Out is back thanks KRITZELKRATZ 3000 and Rainbow Arts, as the legendary developer returns in a big way for X-Out: Resurfaced. I can only fathom of a few retro remakes that look and feel this good to play. It was a game ahead of its time, and the depths it goes to be an engaging and challenging shmup. X-Out: Resurfaced is faithfully recreated, and this unique shoot’em up is for all to enjoy once again or for the first time.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
