by Staci Clark

Created on: July 06, 2008   Last Updated: July 08, 2008

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Xeno Sola is a new, downloadable, tile-placement game from Xeno Clone. As Lilja, a blonde human who is drawn a little too wide-eyed and top-heavy to seem like a fierce competitor in this game or any other, you must compete against three computer-controlled characters: Ptole, a gray-skinned, pink-haired creature; Daiyu, a red-headed human who is nowhere near as buxom as Lilja; and Iason, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle who seems to have left his shell at home. The four players take turns placing tiles on a board, as they slowly build a space station piece by piece and tile by tile. Supposedly, whoever has the most points after all the tiles have been placed on the board wins the game or at least that level of the game.

In theory, Xeno Sola should be a simple game. After all, how complicated can placing tiles on a board be? However, without any clear directions on how to play the game and only five minutes of trial play to figure it out on your own, Xeno Sola is actually quite confusing.

The game tries to ease that confusion by offering you the chance to play a tutorial prior to playing the actual game, yet when you click on the tutorial link in the Main Menu, you will find that the tutorial is not a tutorial at all. Instead, it is simply a page that tells you in a cartoon bubble how much each tile is worth in the game. Apparently, a landing platform tile is worth 3 points when it's completed and 1.5 points when it's incomplete. A power line tile is worth 2 points when it's completed and 1 point when it's incomplete. A power node tile is worth 4 times the number of lines in the node when it's completed and only 2 points when it's incomplete. The tutorial neither explains nor shows what a completed tile looks like or how you even go about completing a tile in the game.

The tutorial also tells you in another cartoon bubble that you can place bets on tiles to get extra points in the game. However, it fails to explain what you are betting is going to happen, when you're allowed to bet, and how to determine where on the tile you're going to place the bet. The tutorial, therefore, is basically useless.

Demo play isn't much better than the tutorial. A pop-up bubble at the top of the screen merely advises you that white-highlighted tiles can be lifted from the board and that clicking on the right mouse button rotates the tiles. Meanwhile, a countdown timer at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen constantly reminds you that your five minutes is about to run out.

The demo version of Xeno Sola simply does not give you enough time or help to figure out how to play the game, let alone whether you like it enough to purchase the full version. For that reason and due to the fact that the game basically depicts Lilja as Stripper Anime Barbie, I would not waste a $1 on the full version of Xeno Sola, let alone $14.95.

Learn more about this author, Staci Clark.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.