NeonXSZ (pronounced "neon excesses") is a cyberpunk first-person six-degrees-of-freedom shooter beta-launched in 2014 by Intravenous Software, firstly on Desura, then eventually on Steam Early Access. Now released in Febuary 23, 2016 as Version 1.0.
The idea is that the player takes on the role of an "anomaly" inside one of several gigantic cybernetic space stations, where a constant war is being fought between four factions allied on two teams - the OS and Antivirus, and the Malware and Viruses. The player is tasked with piloting their ship through various territories at their own leisure, shoot down ships to gain data fragments, which eventually lead to nice, shiny upgrades for their ship. In the center of the station are a number of gateways to various "challenge arenas", where one can fight off an assortment of hostile ships while navigating their way through the possibly maze-like arena, before turning the arena over to the faction of their choice.
The game can be found here
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HOSTILE...EXAMPLES...DETECTED:
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Especially when you're selling equipment on an enemy base than your allies. If enemies hate you more, the less profitable you get and the more you are going to pay for upgrading your ship.
- Always Chaotic Evil/Lawful Good: Two factions presents these tropes:
- The former, the Malware, is simply an Army of Thieves and Whores who will attack anything even themselves without the slightest provocation.
- The latter, the Anti-Virus, stock Law Enforcement stereotype who will attack Viruses, Malware and even you (provided when you make a Face–Heel Turn) whenever they're present.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Despite of the game being made by one man, the game comes in several conveniences compared to most 6DOF variants.
- Your base damage for all of your weapons increases as your Tech level increases. Reducing the hassle of dealing with upgrading weapons apart from miscellaneous focus you provide in your ship.
- Difficulty can be customized accordingly, if you want enemies to deal massive damage but too stupid to hit a side of a barn, deal little damage as possible but is smart enough to pull off a Death of a Thousand Cuts or simply being Harder Than Hard. Along with it are changes of drop rates.
- The shop offers stronger equipment beforehand if you're struggling on Level Grinding on stronger enemies. Majority of the Uranium grind can also be skipped if you tend to sell earlier versions of your equipment often as you get newer ones from the shop.
- Ascended Glitch: In-Universe, you are the glitch that entered the system of data made out of spaceships.
- Boss Warning Siren: Exaggerated in the sense that it applies to normal enemies, as opposed to bosses. However, this only applies to enemies far above the player's tech level.
- Character Level: The player's "tech level" only goes up the more upgrades are applied to their ship's components. Levels in between whole numbers to two decimal places are counted as well.
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Green for OS, blue for Antivirus, beige for Malware, and red for viruses. This applies to both ships and territories.
- Computer Virus: An entire faction of them is present in the game.
- Computer Voice: Betty sends notifications through a monotone voice that speaks one word at a time. One instance of one of these notifications is the above Boss Warning Siren example.
- Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Expect to die a lot in the beginning and at least a slight deduction from your Uranium total.
- Dynamic Loading: The game minimises the time spent doing nothing while the game loads by having the game's details gradually Fade In on loading the game up, allowing the player to get going while the game populates the current station with friendly and hostile NPCs.
- Evil Is Burning Hot: Areas controlled by the Virus occasionally have areas with flames coming out of them.
- Face–Heel Turn: If you find supporting the Operating System and the Anti-Virus completely boring. Until you regret dying in every moment you spawn, especially when your home base is your enemy's.
- Gotta Catch Them All: This game has loads of spaceships for you to collect as you kill countless new ones in your wake. Or you can just buy them all in Uranium.
- Harder Than Hard: Difficulty settings can be hardwired to this. Not only you get served right off the bat with a few shots, but the enemies will be dodgy and accurate as Heck.
- The Maze: Certain arena areas come across as this.
- Obliviously Evil: You get to pull this off yourself when you decided to switch sides with the Viruses then going back to the Operating System. You Bastard!.
- Power Source: Uranium is used currently as the main power source for every ship. It also doubles as Fictional Currency.
- Recycled In Space: Inverted, every spacecraft invited into the game is a digital construct flying on circuit boards.
- Shock and Awe: The close-range "lightning" weapon.
- Shout-Out: C1 Diligent is very much inspired from the original Descent ship.
- Tron Lines: As you'd expect in a game set in a circuit-board.
