Xenophobe (NES) review "It mostly bores the hell out of you. Mostly..."

There was a time when Xenophobe was a glorious game, and incidentally that time involved lots of coin-operated machinery. Every shopping center, mall, and small town had its own arcade filled with swiftly-paced score-attack titles designed to practically rob of you coinage. You ran away from ghosts and blasted spaceships and hopped over barrels, racking up points so you can put FUK or ASS or some other puerile thing on a top score list (nowadays referred to as a "leaderboard").

This went on for so long that developers began cloning successful products more often than not, and only sometimes expanded on an original title's premise. Now and then, though, you'd see a game that stood out from the rest and begged to be played. It didn't coerce the coins out of your pocket because you willfully gave them until you had naught but lint left behind. Xenophobe was exactly this game, appearing as a side-scrolling shooter decked out with pulp sci-fi trappings mixed with shades of the horror flick "Alien" and its action-filled sequel. You commanded one of a handful of space travelers tasked with exterminating hideous creatures that passingly resembled the Xenomorphs in the aforementioned movies, while also minding the stage's self-destruct timer. Accomplishing that, you nabbed a wealth of extra points and secured your place as a god among mere Galaga-playing mortals.

Everything in the arcade version, during its heyday, was neat as hell. The way the game split into four sub-screens so a quartet of friends could wipe out alien scum together looked tidy and satisfyingly symmetrical, even organized. Plus the pleasing mesh of colorful, cartoony visuals and the implications of confined-space sci-fi horror played to both my camp-loving aesthetic and fascination with all things scary. Let's also not forget all the rooms you ventured into, moseying in either direction and turning up in curious little spaces sporting various little details. You had to wonder what kind of quarters you were exploring, and what befell the people on that space station. Did they hole up while the aliens invaded, or scatter and get slowly picked off? It seemed like there was a tale to tell, and each room lent itself the narrative your own head concocted.

You can imagine, then, that when I discovered that the game had been ported to the NES that I was beside myself with excitement. I couldn't not rent the hell out of it when it turned up at the local video store, thinking I would get the same experience with only a slight downgrade. How foolish I was then, and how even sillier it is now that I've recently replayed the game rather than leaving it in a more pleasantly remembered past...

The NES version of Xenophobe isn't progress-based at all. Your only goal is to secure a high score and boast to your friends about how awesome you are. Remember when that mattered? These days, people still compete for a place on leaderboards, but placing high is only for the best of the best, and no one honestly cares if FUK places 14545th just behind WeeDisGoD420. While some score attackers have stood the test of time because they remain addictive little distractions that pass a few minutes here and there, the years haven't been kind to Xenophobe and even less so to its NES counterpart.

Here, you only get the choice of three different characters: an anthropomorphic duck, a bald alien and an old dude with an eye patch. From there, you venture into a space station teeming with the same monsters, only now they look like indiscernible masses of flesh with mouths on them. You can run in either direction, not to mention shoot and jump, and that's really about it. You mosey from one room to another, dispatching extraterrestrials until time expires, in which case the title ushers you off the station and back to your own vessel. There, based on your kill count and acquired items, you receive more points that matter even less now because 1) as an NES title played at home, you won't have the benefit of showing off your initials to other passers-by, and 2) this is a pre-internet game, so there is no online leaderboard.

I get it, though. This iteration is just trying to recapture the arcade version's magic in a home form, but it fails to do so. For one thing, this release lacks the colorful graphics and wonderful palette seen in the original. The presentation is awfully plain and boring, and doesn't evoke the same sort of campy vibe. Hell, there isn't even much of a soundtrack, with only a main theme that plays during the title and after you perish. While playing, you get nothing but dull silence. In any normal situation, that would at least increase the sense of dread, since you are basically trapped on a base with a bunch of wanna-be Xenomorphs. However, the lack of music here only serves to further deaden the experience.

Not that there was much here to begin with. You can tell Xenophobe is an antiquated title, because merely running around and shooting everything that moves passed as cutting edge in the '80s. Now, with drab visuals and no music, this title's core concept comes across as the bare minimum to register as an action game, made all the more lifeless by the aforementioned snags. If you were to toss in some mechanical flaws, this release could almost pass for an Action 52 piece.

Yeah, I'll go ahead and be reductive: all you do in this game is wander around and shoot things until you die. When you do, the game ends and that's it. There is no campaign because the levels loop, and there are no continues because what's the point? More than anything, this setup is a reminder that Xenophobe came out at the wrong time, just before the industry moved away from high scores and more toward storylines and such.

Xenophobe constituted the natural progression of the action genre, but one that would surely be outdone by its descendants. Games like Doom, for instance, would later take the same idea and expand graciously upon it. You can bet that if the primary release got left in the dust, then its lesser NES port fell even further into irrelevance, thanks to its horribly dialed back offerings. There was no hope of this game ever being as good as its predecessor, and that only meant that it was doomed to a far worse fate. Rather than aging just poorly, it withered into the nauseating, bare bones title it is now; a grim reminder of times gone, and an inadequate attempt to bring that magic from the arcade into the living room.

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (October 29, 2025) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.