Radix: Beyond The Void is is a First Person Corridor-based space shooter developed by Neural Storm Entertainment and published by Epic Games, then Epic Megagames, in 1995 for MS-DOS. Now Abandonware, you can obtain the full game here.
Excuse Plot: It's The Future. You are a Space Fighter pilot in the service of Earth's military. Humanity has come under attack by invading aliens and their mechanized armies, via a Portal Network. Unfortunately for them, your objective is to use their network to travel to and destroy key alien instillations, thus crippling their war machine.
Shooter fans might recall that Interplay Entertainment's Descent, a similar game, came out that same year. Unlike Descent, where you typically faced a few powerful robots or a single, very powerful boss, Radix pitted the player against swarming hordes of weak bots that would quickly shred your ship to pieces if not dealt with swiftly.
Radix provides examples of:
- Absurdly Spacious Sewer: One level in the first episode consists of a large water treatment plant and its associated tunnel network.
- Action Bomb: A particular spherical enemy with an oscilating red eye. Mentioned in a briefing to be at least partially composed of
human brain tissue. - Anti-Gravity: Much like the Pyro in Descent, your craft largely ignores such silly concepts as gravity and inertia.
- Deflector Shields: Which regenerate, unlike your hull integrity.
- Energy Weapon: With the obvious exception of the vulcan gun, all of your primary weapons are these.
- Evolving Weapon: Your weapons increase in power and fire-rate when you pick up duplicates of the same weapon.
- Guide Dang It!: Mostly averted. Each mission briefing tells you exactly what to do and where to go, even pointing out the level exit. How you get to each objective, though, can be another matter. See The Maze below.
- Humongous Mecha: In the last level of the first episode, you face a pair of massive Terminator-like robots with wrist missile launchers.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Each is an entire phrase rather then a one-word descriptor. The page quote represents "Very Hard." Others include:
- Easy - I can't do this! I just can't do this!
- Medium - I'm as ready as I'll ever be.
- Hard - Another glorious day in the corps!
- A hidden, even harder difficulty can be accessed by typing "NSDEATH" in-game.
- Macross Missile Massacre: You are capable of this via your secondary weapons. Also, there is an enemy that takes the form of an entire bank of seeking missile launchers built into parts of the level architecture. They're easy to spot and destroy, but the first time you hear that lock-on noise it will probably launch you out of your seat.
- Mana Meter: Your primary weapons (excluding the vulcan) are tied to a regenerating energy meter.
- The Maze: While not nearly as difficult to navigate as Descent's levels and lacking the mad rush to escape the exploding mine, the levels are sufficiently complex to annoy the casual player, at least tempoarily. Navigation troubles are are also compounded by the fact that you are unable to totally stop moving (without a specific Power-Up), not to mention the swarms of enemies.
- Multi-Mook Melee: This is this game's specialty. Many rooms are absolutely jammed full of enemies, all with rapid-firing weapons.
- Nitro Boost: Your craft comes equipped with a regenerating, high-velocity afterburner. Watch your speed though, it's quite easy to go pinballing into walls.
- One-Man Army: Explicit, down to the design of your craft: All of its weaponry has either an obscene fire rate or the ability to hit multiple enemies at once, possibly all of them.
- Power-Up: Pickups include ammo, duplicate weapons that upgrade your on-board ones, Armor, Shield and Energy pickups, and things like temporary invulnerability, temporary infinite energy and the ability to halt your craft and hover in given location.
- Regenerating Shields, Static Health: Aside from being refilled if you grabbed the right powerup, your fighter's shields would slowly recover when you were not being shot. The only way to repair your armor, however, was to grab the corresponding powerup.
- Shareware The first episode, Theta 2, was distributed in this manner. The retail version included the episodes Vengeance and The Void.
- Spread Shot: The Plasma Spreader. Its shots zig-zag wildly along the horizontal plane they were fired from. On the upside, if they miss the first time, they might hit your target on the rebound.
