Hexodius

I went into Hexodius genuinely hoping Brain Slap Studio had threaded something special through the gap between twin-stick shooter and dungeon crawler. That gap is real and inviting, and on paper the pitch lands: pilot your customisable drone B.O.B. through a hexagonal complex, unlock new arena cells on a board-game-style map, spend earned credits on shields, mines, turrets, EMP fields, and speed upgrades, then use them to survive waves of enemy droids while your robot companion Fred hacks terminals or you destroy generators against a timer. The bones of something enjoyable are genuinely here. The problem is pacing and enemy design. Mission types cycle through just three templates, survive, destroy, and defend, and they rotate with a mechanical reliability that drains urgency from the whole thing. Worse, the enemy droids move slowly enough that you can often plant yourself in a corner and simply shoot, which is a quiet death sentence for any arena shooter. The upgrade shop is more expansive than you might expect, offering permanent boosts to fire rate and speed alongside activated abilities, but the variety of loadout options never quite translates into meaningful pressure to experiment, because the difficulty rarely demands it. The dungeon exploration layer, the hex map itself, functions more like a menu than a world; cells unlock cells, shops appear between fights, and the sense of discovery fades once you realise each themed zone (garden, snow, volcanic) mostly just recolours the same encounter beats. Arcade mode offers six arenas for score attack with online leaderboards, which is the game at its most honest: short bursts, no narrative weight dragging on the throttle, just shooting and dodging. The catch is that maps and weapons must be unlocked through story mode first, which creates friction for the very audience most likely to enjoy this slice of the game. The chiptune soundtrack has a certain lo-fi warmth to it, though it grows repetitive across longer sessions. Visually the game is clean and readable if unambitious; the overworld map is easy to parse and arenas do not clutter the screen badly, which at least keeps the actual shooting functional. Hexodius landed in 2013 with a Metacritic score of 47 and mixed Steam user reviews, and the years have not reshaped that consensus. It is not a broken game. The controls are tight, the controller support is solid (keyboard play is genuinely rough here), and there are moments, usually against boss encounters that break the loop, where something clicks. But the twin-stick genre has always competed on the quality of its worst five minutes, and Hexodius has too many of those. For deeply patient fans of the genre who want something to idle through between more demanding sessions, it delivers a modest, forgettable afternoon. Everyone else has much better options.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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