Anoxia Station

Indie gaming. Sometimes you get burned.

Anoxia Station boasted an interesting enough hollow earth premise to con me into shilling out a few bucks instead of letting it inevitably drop to the fifty cents it's really worth at most. Whether it's a cynical asset-flip or sophomoric grandstanding, just don't bother.

 

I've already criticized its abuse of dim or no light, but that's the least of its crimes.

 

It tries to shoehorn real-time elements into what is obviously a turn-based base-building strategy game, like a turn timer or rapidly clicking buildings to extinguish fires. It works just as well as it did for M.A.X. 2 thirty years ago. What's that? You've never heard of MAX2? That's right, you haven't.

 

Its creative side has you chasing curios nonsensically in lieu of actual content. Its hollow earth vision is just a random "attack of the giant whatever" litany. Snail, moth, eel, worm. Yeah, whatever. It never makes good on such cheese like more expert approaches.

 

Then there's the interface wrangling, like the mouse pointer being slightly offset vertically. Or frozen mobs taking control of your camera for several seconds at the start of each round for dramatic effect, which then repeats every single turn they remain on the map, per mob. Or the timesink of reassigning leader passive bonuses every single turn. Or the over-exaggerated effects like a full-screen camera shake or flashing during disasters, which will be the first things you turn off only to discover they never completely go away.

 

Then there's its failures as a strategy game, like over-dependence on randomization making even D&D seem reasonable by comparison. Or monsters spawning on a particular tile but getting infinite-range attacks eliminating the relevance of positioning. Or upgraded buildings losing their lower tier's active ability or leader ability for no logical reason.

 

But the straw which finally broke this camel's back was the screenshot above, reaching the end of a mission and not being permitted to leave. I assumed it was because I hadn't finished an objective. Reload and try again, exhaust the damn reservoir, count my turns carefully for a dash to the exit, only to discover myself still blocked, with zero explanation for why exactly it won't accept my order to move onto the exit tunnel square. Do I need to be a turn early, do I need to discover something else on the map, do I need some upgrade? Fuck it. I just stopped caring. One more for the Bozo pile.