Retro Replay Review

Gameplay

The first few minutes make a clear case for Xyanide: Resurrection. Your ship moves forward on its own, leaving you to weave up, down, left, and right through enemy fire while shooting back. The useful wrinkle is camera rotation: attacks can arrive from all angles, so you are not simply holding a reticle on a line of targets. When the screen gets busy, turning your view to locate a new threat gives the action a frantic, slightly disorienting rhythm.

Combat starts plainly with the fusion gun and bombs, then gradually gets more interesting once you are spending collected xyanide. Enemies drop the same resource that restores health, but it also pays for weapons and upgrades between stages. That creates a worthwhile tension: collecting drops helps you survive now, yet you also want enough currency to improve the ship for the next level. The shotgun, laser, and rockets give you reasons to experiment, while the magnet makes pickup collection less fiddly and the shield offers breathing room when evasive flying breaks down.

There is not much campaign runway. Story mode has five sequential levels, so you will reach its end before the systems can grow into something truly expansive. The better reason to stick around is improvement. Quick Play lets you revisit unlocked stages to tighten a run and chase a higher score, while Score Attack puts a timer on that same urge to destroy quickly and collect efficiently. The two-player mode is competitive rather than cooperative, asking each person to outscore the other through pickups, so it works best as a short, score-chasing contest.

Frustration is most likely to set in when enemies pressure you from multiple directions and the rotating view makes it harder to immediately orient yourself. Yet that stress is also where the game has its sharpest moments. If you enjoy rail shooters that ask you to read danger, dodge decisively, and replay stages for better results, Resurrection has enough of a hook to justify several returns.

Graphics

The game keeps the action in a third-person spaceship view, with enemy assaults coming from around the ship rather than only from directly ahead. That rotating perspective gives the space battles a more enclosed, surround-you feel than a standard straight-ahead rail shooter.

Story

Resurrection continues the first Xyanide, with executioner Drake hunting the space witch Aguira after she escapes her death sentence. Aguira has used xyanide to shape a strange world, and Drake travels through it to bring her in. It is a direct chase setup, built to move you from one combat stage to the next rather than slow the shooter down with elaborate detours.

The premise has a pleasingly pulpy sci-fi weirdness: an executioner, an escaped witch, and a substance powerful enough to create an entire hostile world. It gives the shooting a little more flavor than a generic alien invasion, even if the campaign’s short five-level structure leaves limited room for the conflict to develop.

Unlockable digital comics and artwork offer an extra reward for spending time with the game beyond a single clear. They are especially welcome if Aguira’s strange setting is what catches your interest, though the central attraction remains flying through that world and surviving its attacks.

Overall Experience

Xyanide: Resurrection is a modest but likable score-driven shooter. Its strongest idea is not the story but the combination of automatic forward movement, free dodging within the lane, and a view that can rotate toward threats attacking from all sides. That makes ordinary enemy waves demand more awareness than they first appear to.

The campaign is short enough that you should not buy in expecting a long sci-fi epic, and the upgrade selection is focused rather than vast. Still, the xyanide economy does a solid job of linking survival, pickup collection, and progression. You can feel a practical reason to chase drops even when bullets are already filling the screen.

Give it a chance if you want a compact rail shooter with replayable stages and a score-attack mindset. The payoff is not a huge adventure; it is the satisfaction of returning to a stage with better weapons, cleaner movement, and a clearer sense of where the pressure points are. For more game-specific background, see this Xyanide: Resurrection history and release overview.

Retro Replay Score

6.7/10