Given that Xeno Crisis has featured on Xbox Game Pass and other digital download platforms, I suspect that a fair number of retro fans will already be familiar with this excellent arena shooter. For those who aren't, Xeno Crisis is really a love-letter to arcade classics Robotron: 2084 and Smash T.V. The DNA of Eugene Jarvis courses through the game's pulsating, slime-filled veins, as players engage in close-quarter battles with a whole bunch of alien scum, lab-grown monstrosities, not to mention more than a handful of rogue scientists.
I picked up the Xeno Crisis Neo Geo ROM as part of Bitmap Bureau's Black Friday promotions for £10, which I really don't consider bad value, especially given the quality of the product. For those with deeper pockets and a desire to play the game on original hardware, you could pony up for the eye-wateringly expensive AES or MVS cartridge versions (with optional high-quality repro case and inlays), but the downloadable ROM version was perfect for me.
The reason why Xeno Crisis garnered so much attention, other than the fact it's a spiffingly fun game, is Bitmap Bureau released versions for the Sega Genesis, Dreamcast and Neo Geo. I covered the Genesis port a while back and was mightily impressed, but the Neo Geo version is even better. The enhanced hardware really gives the game room to stretch its legs. The audio quality is hugely improved, particularly the music, and there's also digitised speech which I don't recall featuring in the other versions I've played. The graphics also feel on par with the modern incarnations of the game; Henk Nieborg and Catherine Menabde did such a great job on the artwork - Xeno Crisis bears the hallmarks of a classic 16-bit game of old, but with modern flourishes and touches that help keep things fresh.
As for the gameplay, it's pretty simple. Choose a character, annihilate the bad guys, dodge the bullets and grab the loot. Upgrade your equipment at the end of each level after defeating a hideously grotesque boss, and just try and survive as long as you can.
The game supports dual analogue controls on modern platforms, and it's really a twin-stick shooter at heart. Fortunately, the gameplay doesn't really suffer on the "retro" releases; the difficulty feels like it has been tweaked to account for the control scheme, and everything feels very slick.
Provided you don't mind a stiff challenge, I'm pretty sure you'll find Xeno Crisis right up your alley.
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