By sjj_admin 
Originally published on GameOnAus.com in July 2022
I’m quite a fan of puzzle platformers so it show be no surprise that XEL made it on my radar. It’s doing its best to be a Zelda-like game and you can definitely see the influence that the Nintendo staple has had on developers Tiny Roar. The trailer had pretty much everything I look for in a game. The combat looked fun, different power ups that had different status effects, and of course puzzles!
There’s a couple of things I noticed when I started XEL on the Nintendo Switch. Firstly it is a pretty game. The environments and characters look very nice in their cartoonish style. The second is that the game is fully voice acted, a rarity in indie titles.
Unfortunately XEL’s shortcomings are also apparent from the beginning. From the opening cutscene you can see that the voice acting doesn’t match up with the characters very well. It may not seem like such a big thing but it’s representative of the lack of polish from the portions of the game that I was able to play.
XEL’s story starts with the player character Reid crash landing on a strange world. She’s met by small robot that guides her through the introduction. Basic puzzles such as pushing boxes and pressing certain buttons to open paths lead you towards the sword and shield. Combat is quite interesting. It’s fun to lock on to enemies and use the dash to zip out of range of attacks. The shield is handy for blocking attacks but impacts to it reduces your stamina, which is also shared with your dash.
The pretty environments I mentioned earlier suffered when transitioning between areas. The early transitions just suddenly, jarringly change lighting and it doesn’t take long for these transitions to impact how zones load. It was quite common for me to move into areas and half of the environment to not load in for a few seconds.
About thirty minutes into XEL I encountered the first boss. I was quite frustrated with how hard it was to dodge its first attack and when it moved to its second phase it felt like the outlines for the area of effect attacks wasn’t accurate.
It was soon after that I encountered my first game breaking bug. I found myself on a fence and couldn’t get off so I loaded from the last save point. Somehow this broke the game. My save wouldn’t load and I had to start the game again. Unfortunate but games are complex and it happens sometimes. But another lock happened about an hour into my second playthrough attempt that had be seriously questioning why I was bothering with XEL. I was at a puzzle involving putting a battery into a switch but for some reason the switch wasn’t registering the battery. It was very disheartening.
All this is before mentioning encounters with NPCs. The fully voiced characters get cut off in cutscenes and character names don’t appear in subtitles even after they’ve introduced themselves. They also just randomly slide out of cutcenes.
I feel bad unloading on XEL in this way, but the bugs really take away from any enjoyment I remotely had. This is one game that could have done with some more time in development.
XEL is out now on PC, Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo Switch.