Xyanide proves that you can have everything required for a great, original Shmup and still mess it up somehow.
The game opens up quite eerily on an alien planet where a bunch of cloaked people with black metal bird-like masks march toward a young girl named Aguira who we quickly learn is a demonic witch responsible for various killing sprees on the goofily named planet Mardar who is sentenced to death by being launched into some strange looking sphere around the alien's sun which is supposed to be a black hole. The EXTREMELY creepy robotic big cheese of this order, a giant metal face called the Inquisitor, assigns the executioner – the player – to escort her launch ship and ensure she dies, but the operation is stopped by a random asteroid. This asteroid is laced with a chemical called Xyanide that can cause the user's imagination to become reality and of all the crew members on the ship, the Xyanide asteroid shards affect Aguira who then uses the massive extent of her own demented imagination and motivation of revenge to… make a giant, repetitive, boring space station. Yes I'm serious. And you have to explore it in order to kill her.
Xyanide is basically a Rail Shooter, mostly because the developers didn't want to focus on one definable scrolling direction and have the camera constantly rotate around the player's ship. I call it a Rail shooter because you see the backside of your tiny bioship more often than its side, diagonal angles or even top-down perspective. Your firepower is directed by a multi-directional Vulcan weapon, but since you're piloting a bioship you can use either the mechanical or biotic form of the ship: the biotic form has a Vulcan while the mechanical form has a laser beam. It's a nice little Sci-Fi game motif (if Bio-Ship Paladin was any indication), but it takes awhile to shift between the two for some reason. You get power-ups that are each affected differently depending on one of the two ship modes, most of which are pretty helpful, but each one's temporary which is actually a bad thing because it's pretty easy to die in this game.
I've played plenty of Shmups where the main attack from your bad guys is to ram into your ship, but Xyanide takes the violent suicidal idiots cake. Often times it's hard to tell what killed you because your enemies fly in too fast to spot. Thankfully, the mini-bosses and boss fights make up for the Idiot Brigade that is your enemies. There's something genuinely awesome laying down long distance fire on a pursuing battleship or avoiding lightning fire from a giant rotating gun turret, both which highlight some truly great graphics especially in later, less mechanical levels. Sadly, it takes forever to get to these moments because the levels in this game are not only long, but unimaginative and, amassed, would seem slower than a Jean Rollin movie.
The sound effects are pretty cool and actually gave me a little chill of Playstation launch-title nostalgia with the strange power-up noises. The soundtrack on the other hand is lacking somewhat; you better have some CDs ready for your Custom soundtrack for this one. When you play a Shoot em' Up, you kind of expect the game to have a fantastic score to lead you into the action. Xyanide's score matches the mechanical setting, but it never showcases the action going in on: it's too slow paced and relaxed for an action title It's weird too, because the music during the cinematics match the events exactly and with great energy. What's funny about the soundtrack is that it never truly matches the action or makes the game feel fast paced or unique in any way until the very last level! Yeah, only after what feels like three hours does the in-game soundtrack ever get interesting! Like I said, you better have some music ready for your X-Box. You'll get so sick of the same dull faux electronica it'll make you want to scream. *
Which leads to one of the downers to this game: the pace. The levels to Xyanide are long and almost meaninglessly long. From level 2 up to the end, the levels seem to drag on in length as if they were leading up to something really fantastic beyond a mini-boss or actual boss battle. There was a moment during gameplay where I was longing for a mini-boss battle to immediately lead into the level boss for fear of the level lasting any longer. Let me just ask you this: does any shoot em' up level need to last twenty minutes plus? With nothing happening beyond the usual encounter with hostile spaceships? There's literally nothing else happening during these stretches! This could be easy to overlook if the levels actually had variety to them, but they don't.
For three levels straight, you do nothing but fly through the exact same metallic corridors fighting the same enemies and similar battle ships that you did in the first level, only encountering a slightly different mini-boss and leading your way up to a different immobile level boss. Add this to the abusive length of every level and the fast paced action quickly turns to slow paced padding. There is at least three seconds worth of level variation where the background will have random girders, fire or a huge fan, but for the most part you just fly from one end of the synaptic space station to another. This almost entirely goes against the originality of the opening premise where Aguira is using the combined power Xyanide and her imagination to create a world of chaos at her command; you mean to tell me she couldn't think of anything other than spaceships and metallic corridors to use against us?
That's what I feel Xyanide truly fails at, though, the promise of a unique and engaging plot. The game manual, box art and reviews all claim everything you're fighting is from Aguira's own twisted imagination, but if that's the case then it turns out that Aguira's imagination isn't all that twisted after all. Seriously, all she does is she creates a space station and squadron and later on we get attacked by hostile alien monsters from the inner lining of an alien planet. True, these monsters might actually be from her mind, but I doubt it because if they were we would have been fighting these creatures TWO and a HALF HOURS ago in the space station levels!! The hero from Psychosis had a more vivid imagination than this woman! The game sold itself as having a beyond-brilliant plot when it turns out the opening premise is only good and comparatively more original than most in the genre complete with its own artistic direction.
I've played 2D Shoot em' Ups with just as good stories, some of which rarely even got any screen time and were all printed in the game's manual (sometimes in another language) or in later imported creator commentaries. Xyanide's opening premise and setting are truly original and different, yes, but in terms of delivering what it promised it fails almost miserably. It's like the developers didn't think it would be boring or disengaging to have this supposedly evil person make a truly evil place using her mind when instead she just makes a place to exact her revenge made of metal and crystals whereupon she crash-lands on a planet we have no idea what other living things it could be populated with besides humanoids wearing black bird masks and robots. Maybe I was aesthetically expecting too much from this game, a combination of Einhander and Silent Hill 1 (some kind of 3D Metal Black with creepier music or R-Type Delta without the stupid checkpoint system), but what the Hell else did you expect from a 3D Shmup that claims your bad guys are from another person's psychosis?
Xyanide is still a good game in regards to combat, graphics sound and story, but the abusively boring length and design of the levels, the overly relaxed soundtrack and the misleading plot are the only things keeping it from truly being one of the best games on the console. If you're a Shmup lover, like me, and just want some kind of scrolling Sci-Fi shooter on your X-Box, then by all means get Xyanide; I promise you you'll like it, just not as much as Shmups on other, older systems.
*: I've found Wumpscut works best with this game as well as any other video game soundtracks you can get.