Tachyon Project - Xbox One Review

In Tachyon Project, you take control of Ada - a self-aware program designed to hack into secure systems. Unfortunately, during what is meant to be a routine server test, Ada is ejected out to the real world, with no link to those who created her. She must hack her way through ten secure systems in order to find out what happened to her and her creators...

The game itself is a pretty stand dual-stick shooter. You're in an arena slightly larger than your TV screen and you need to fight off waves of enemies in order to complete each level. There are ten levels in total, and each level is split into six waves. Each wave has its own objective, such as killing a specified number of a specified enemy, or simply surviving for a specified length of time. In short, nothing particularly imaginative - a theme that will repeat itself throughout most of the game.

There are a number of weapons and power-ups available but, unlike most games in this genre, you can only change your loadout in-between levels. There are no drops during the levels themselves that change how you play, which removes one of the most fun aspects of the twin-stick shooter genre. They've also added a story, with cutscenes, around each level. Another thing that other games in the genre tend to avoid because no-one plays these games for a story. They play these game to shoot everything as much as possible. As such, these attempts to make the title more unique has, unfortunately, detracted from the experience instead.

At least you can skip the cutscenes, though. To their credit, they do try really hard to add personality and humour to the game, but it's a wasted effort.



The gameplay itself, however, is pretty good. Though it starts off slow, you are quickly introduced to a large number of varied enemies, all of which behave differently and cause their own sets of problems. Again, most of these enemies are pretty generic for this type of game, but there's a couple in there that really spice things up. The weapons and perks you choose also make a difference to how you play, but again you end up wishing that they'd drop during combat to mix things up a bit.

Your health is effectively time, which quickly ticks away as you play. Luckily, you can regain health by killing things. The more you kill, the more life you have. You can also lose life by colliding with enemies. Most will only remove a small amount of life from you, but others will take away large chunks or simply kill you immediately. This becomes a delicate balancing act when dealing with the game's rather unique "stealth" server levels.

On these stealth servers, you remain undetected unless you are firing. When you reveal yourself, all of the enemies will begin to attack you - and there's usually a lot more on these kinds of levels than you'd be used to so far in the game. These levels also have a number of unique enemies designed to reveal your position, so a hit-and-run strategy makes a nice change to the normal gameplay.

Unfortunately, these unique levels just aren't enough to make the game stand above its competitors. In the end, it's a pretty standard twin-stick shooter with enough poor choices to detract from the good. As such, I just can't give this title any more than an average 6/10.

It's worth picking up if you like this sort of game, but maybe wait until it goes on sale. Or pick up Sixty Second Shooter Prime instead, which pretty much nails exactly what you want from a twin-stick shooter.

Good honest review mate.

I preferred this to sixty second shooter, but I also admit to skipping the cutscenes

Well described mate.

Maybe a sale purchase for me.

Cool downloading now, do like a twin stick shooter and could use some mindless gameplay right now as I can't seem to get into anything at the mo.

Still think I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1 is the best twin stick on Xbox though. Hoping that gets brought over with the backward compatibility

Yeah, same. That games awesome. You should pick up 60 Second Shooter if you don't have it as well.

Don't pick up Project Root, though. That game's horrificly bad.

Nice review dude

Tachyon Project Patch Released on Xbox One
A new patch for Tachyon Project with lots of improvements has been released on Xbox One

As most of you already know, Tachyon Project was released on July the 15th, 2015 on Xbox One and PC. Many of you have written reviews or given me feedback directly or in your streams or youtube videos. We tried to incorporate as much feedback as we could to improve the game. The results can be played now in a patch that's available as of today.

We had a lot of feedback and we couldn't satisfy it all, but we tried to focus on the most important or relevant parts. Here is the list of improvements:
New story mode+ game mode that lets you re-play the whole game in an extra difficulty level
7 new challenges. Many of them inspired by your suggestions. All of them with the option of local multiplayer.
Re-balancing of difficulty. Certain levels were a bit 'uneven' with regards to difficulty. We've tried to fix that and give a more coherent difficulty level througout the game.
Ship config screen in-game. This one was suggested by many reviews and players. You can now change the ship loadout when you're killed without going to the menu and thus, re-starting where you were killed.
Performance improvements. We've improved performance in some critical areas.
Minor bug fixes and tweaks. We've taken the opportunity to tweak other minor areas such as ship speed and fix minor bugs.
We understand this is just an update for a game 2 and a half months old, so we don't expect it to be major news. Anyway, if you get the time to give it a go we'd really appreciate your feedback again. We take feedback quite seriously so please, feel free to drop us an e-mail with your thoughts on the patch. We're particularly interested in your opinion on the new challenges and the difficulty for the new game mode. Of course if you want to publish anything you're most welcome to do it

Here's the link to the game on the Xbox One Store:

https://store.xbox.com/Xbox-One/Games/Tachyon-Project/cf003d23-e893-4362-b2ac-59cff298b24a