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Xenophobe Title Screen

When I first played Xenophobe on the NES in my youth, I found it to be a fairly middling action game.  The same eight levels cycled over and over again, and none of them involved much more than blowing up a lot of aliens.  That’s fun as far as it goes, but it does get boring pretty quickly.  So when I found out that the version of Xenophobe on the unfortunate Atari Lynx handheld was different, I figured that that would only extend to the number of levels.  Instead, what I got was a pretty pleasant experience.

Xenophobe is a very transparent knockoff of the Alien franchise.  Earth was long ago taken over by an evil race of aliens known as Xenos, and now they’ve taken over all of the space stations and lunar bases surrounding Terra, humanity’s second home.  It’s up to a team of specialists to exterminate the threat before the Xenos can make landfall and send us into extinction.  They’ll have to make their way through 22 bases before they can travel to the moon that the queen mother of the aliens is housed inside and cut the head off of the hive.

You start off in Xenophobe by choosing one of the eight allied characters to play.  They range from a generic Marine type to a sentient avian creature, but they’re all the same in the ways that count.  They basically serve as a life counter–when one dies, you can’t play him again for the rest of the game–but you can only use four of them in a single-player game.  They each start off with a measly little phazer gun but can eventually upgrade to the deadly electro-gun or the even deadlier (but hard to use) poofer gun.  They can also pick up a number of grenades that are powerful enough to destroy many Xenos in one shot, and especially in later levels, this is necessary to survive.

Mr. Eeeez is being chewed on by a Critter.

In Xenophobe, your enemy is many in number and has several (ugly) faces.  First are the mostly harmless Critters, little things that try to latch onto you and act as a distraction.  They eventually grow into the armadillo-like Rollerbabies that have nearly impenetrable shells, and from there to the dreaded Snotterpillars which spit acid and pummel you mercilessly.  In addition, you have Tentacles that project from the floor and ceiling and attempt to strangle you, as well as the freakish Festors, who hide in doorways and can zap you with their x-ray eyes.  The Festors are also the mother aliens, so they’re responsible for keeping the infestation alive.

One of the many space stations to reconquer.

The 23 levels in Xenophobe vary in size and contents.  Most levels are pretty standard, with anywhere between one and five floors (with eight rooms in each) filled with Xeno scum.  Some levels present additional hazards, such as sealed containment units which were foolishly used to study the Xenos and now must be emptied of their hazardous contents, and fires that must be put out with an extinguisher (which happens to make for a very crummy weapon, incidentally).  The last level is quite different from all of the others; you make a mad dash through a horde of aliens across a cavern to the giant Queen Festor you must destroy.

Though the levels vary, your object in Xenophobe is always to eradicate all of the Xenos in each base.  The best way to do this is by killing them all; computers tell you how much of the base is infested as a percentage, and you can get this down to zero by destroying everything you see and letting the remnant population die out.  You can also activate the self-destruct in some bases, which works well but keeps you from getting a health bonus.  Finally, if you play badly, the Festors will eventually spawn enough Xenos to take over the entire base and you’ll be forced out and on to the next one.

The most surprising thing about the Lynx version of Xenophobe is the depth.  Though it is still mostly a run-and-gun game, there are plenty of objects lying round that have a use.  In addition to the obvious health items and things that only give you bonus points, these include disks that allow you to teleport between rooms, knives that can be used to cut yourself loose from tentacles if you’re inattentive enough to run into them, and even a comlink that tells you what the infestation level of the base is at all times.  It’s pretty basic compared to more serious games, but it adds a lot to what would very quickly become tedious otherwise.

Col. Schickn faces off against a Snotterpillar.

In addition to all of this, you can also hook multiple Lynxes together and play Xenophobe’s impressive multiplayer mode.  Each of the players can pick one of the allied characters and go through the game in cooperative mode–in this case, the game ends when all of the characters are dead.  Players who are feeling particularly passive-aggressive can also play as an enemy Snotterpillar; one player can do this per level.  The player Snotterpillar is much like all of the other Snotterpillars on the base and has the same attacks.  In addition, the player can sneakily pick up weapons; though he can’t use them, he keeps the other side from using them as well.  On the down side, if the Snotterpillar gets killed then the player is forced to wait until the end of the level before playing again as any character.

Unfortunately, I was unable to actually play the multiplayer mode of Xenophobe, but the single-player mode by itself is good enough to make it one of the best games on a generally unnotable system.  The only major complaint I have about it is that there are more levels than the game can sustain; several of the later levels are rehashes of earlier levels with different layouts but basically the same strategy.  Despite that and the average graphics and sound, Xenophobe is well suited to the Lynx, being fun to play for a free half-hour whether alone or with friends.