X-Out: Resurfaced Review – Who Said Water Levels Can’t Be Good?

The 90s were packed with interesting shoot ‘em up titles, but none dared go deep below the ocean quite like X-Out. Instead of avoiding asteroids and starships, you’re navigating deadly reefs in a powerhouse of a submarine. If the underwater theme doesn’t diversify this schmup enough for you, its highly variable fleet customization might. Of course, X-Out: Resurfaced is a remake and not a direct port, so there’s some notable additions and convenience features here, though perhaps not as many as one might hope for.

The biggest addition from a gameplay perspective is the option to have preconfigured loadouts. X-Out’s most innovative feature was the wonderful shop system which let players customize a fleet of ships with a range of weapons and accessories. The new prefig loadout screen allows you to bypass that ‘busywork’ and head straight into the action with one of three loadout options.

But considering how brutal later levels get, you may need to use a better submarine than the default Trilobite pill bug. You can choose from four different submarines to create pre-built loadouts from the prefabricator or customize them manually within the shop.

“The biggest addition from a gameplay perspective is the option to have preconfigured loadouts”

Subs can be equipped with cannons, automatic weapons, secondary weapons, and rotating satellites (basically turrets). You may be asking, “With all these weapon options, what differentiates the four submarine types? Well, as it turns out, you’re limited on the number of weapons and accessories you can equip to a sub. The more expensive subs like the Shark allow you to equip up to 10 options while the lowly Trilobite only allow 3. So why ever use a Trilobite sub? Well, It costs less credits, allowing you to purchase a greater number of submarines for your fleet.

Oh yeah, your fleet pretty much functions as your ‘lives’ during a run. Yes, that’s right. You have limited lives and credits for each run. Choosing to build one fully kitted-out Shark or five lightly equipped Trilobites is one of the coolest risk/reward decisions I’ve had to make in a shoot-em-up. The shop allows you to customize the challenge of a run in a more engaging way than a simple difficulty slider. Shop customization adds personal agency to each run, making me feel like a strategic commander and not just a pilot shooting through levels.

“X-Out’s most innovative feature was the wonderful shop system which let players customize a fleet of ships with a range of weapons and accessories.”

Besides the prebuilt loadouts and the inclusion of shop descriptions for every weapon/accessory, this remake includes soundtracks of every version of X-Out. If you ever want to hear what X-Out sounded like on the Amiga, just head over to the options menu and toggle either of the three versions. The new music remixes the classic one faithfully and even includes four new tracks, but the Commadore 64 ost can grate on the ears with its crunchy bit rate.

The soundtrack options are nice, so it’s a bit disappointing we can’t toggle classic and remake graphics in the same way. Thankfully, the enhanced visuals are a treat, faithfully incorporating all the background details and enemy designs of the original into high resolution glory. When compared side-by-side, there’s a negligible difference between the sprite designs and animations. It’s mostly in the lighting and resolution where the visual enhancements really pop. Though, I’ve got to say I’m saddened that you can’t see the full alien submarine commander portrait like in the original.

“This remake includes soundtracks of every version of X-Out.”

A more serious gripe is the lack of online co-op. It’s awesome to have more couch co-op experiences like this, but online functionality should be a basic necessity at this point, especially for a simple shoot-em-up like X-Out. Oh well, there’s still plenty of fun to be had here, even if my online friends won’t be partaking in it with me. Weaving through deep sea caverns with three satellites attached to my shark sub shooting down waves of deadly fish provides a classic shoot-em-up thrill up there with the best of them. There’s no doubt that the shooting is fun, but I wish there was some incentive to manually and methodically shoot instead of just constantly holding down the button.

X-Out is a very attack-heavy game, but there’s a large emphasis placed on maneuvering obstacles and projectiles too. In fact, your submarine gets immediately obliterated when crashing into walls and hard obstacles, a harsh penalty for slight miscalculations. And yet, despite the fact that walls and machines take a much higher toll on your sub than missiles and lasers, the game doesn’t give you many tools to overcome them. The only traversal tools you have is the ability to toggle between four movement speeds and equip a limited-use shield, that’s it. Each submarine is about the same general size, and there’s nothing in the shop that rotates, shrinks, or adds better defense to your ship. In this way, X-Out feels imbalanced. You’re punished gravely for navigating into walls but aren’t given the proportional tools to help mitigate that. You’re given a large offensive toolkit with very little in the way of defense.

“Your submarine gets immediately obliterated when crashing into walls and hard obstacles.”

This isn’t to say that a good offense can’t overcome obstacles in X-Out because it often does. Take those tough crystal block formations; they can be shot through with high-tier cannons. But there are just too many static walls leading to instant death and nary a tool to counter it other than clever maneuvering. Thankfully, the game helps ease that harsh collision penalty with cheats. That’s right, the game has built-in cheats ranging from reduced collision damage to a stage select; however, I’ve only unlocked the reduced collision cheat, and that was due to dying a lot. I still don’t know how to unlock the six or so other cheats. Keep in mind that enabling cheats disables achievements.

And players may need to depend on that collision cheat because X-Out: Resurfaced has no save-states or rewinding to speak of. It used to be common for remakes or ports to tack on a rewind or save feature. The first Mega Man Legacy Collection and Sega Genesis Collection let players save at any time; it’s a pretty convenient feature to have. But alas, just like in the arcades, you have one run and must start from the beginning when your lives run out.

“It’s mostly in the lighting and resolution where the visual enhancements really pop.”

To round out the list of enhancements that would’ve been nice is new game+ after finishing a run. You get a ton of credits from the final stage, and it all goes down the drain after seeing the end screen. Credits get rewarded in a linear fashion from one stage to the other, but by stage six, you’re pretty much rolling in more than you know what to do with. It’s a shame you can’t carry over your credits into mirror mode, which is one of the rather cool additions. Additionally, New Game+ could’ve extended replayability further. Sure, the loadout customization makes every run feel different, and the mirror mode adds something to look forward to, but the eight levels go by pretty fast.

I was a bit unsure how to score X-Out: Resurfaced up to the editing phase of the review. On the one hand, I really like the core game, and the enhancements sprinkle added pleasure on top. On the other, there’s just too many missed opportunities here to overlook, rendering this an average remake. Regardless, it’s great having more classic games available on modern systems, especially one so unique, fun, and challenging as X-Out. But when comparative shoot-‘em-ups like Bio-Hazard Battle come packed with 50 other games in the similarly priced Sega Genesis Collection, it’s hard to say X-Out: Resurfaced is well worth the $20 asking price, especially if you’re not already a fan of the genre.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.