XenoShyft

Last updated on June 5th, 2023 at 05:05 pm

XenoShyft

title

XenoShyft is one of the best $4.99 to play game in the App Store.
Developed by Asmodee Digital, XenoShyft is a Strategy game with a content rating of 12+.
It was released on 17th July 2015 with the latest update 3rd April 2019

Whether you are a fan of Strategy, Card, games, you will find this game interesting and will absolutely like it.

Rating

27 people have rated 2.2.2

You can download the game XenoShyft from APP STORE.

Description

The hit Kickstarter boardgame, now available on mobile!

IMPORTANT: This app requires iPhone 5 or newer, iPad 3 or newer, iPad Mini
or iPod Touch 5th generation or newer!

Defend against waves of horrific aliens in this beautifully illustrated, base defense, deck-building game for 1 to 4 players!

"One of the most fun co-op games I have played in a long time!" – Tom Vasel (The Dice Tower)

"The enemies are just monstrous and difficult!" – Rodney Smith (Watch it Played)

In XenoShyft Onslaught players take on the role of a commander in the NorTec Corporation. You’re tasked with defending your division of the NorTec base as wave after wave of horrific aliens attempt to destroy the base and end NorTec’s strip mining operation.

Gameplay Features

1 – 4 players – Single player compatible, fully cooperative gameplay.

Strong focus on coordination and strategic planning – to overcome the game’s intense difficulty players will need to work together.

Base-Defense with deck-building elements

Incredible art – Illustrated by three amazing artists, XenoShyft features beautiful and consistent art. All of which creates one cohesive and frightening universe.

Inventive and exciting armor and weapon upgrade cards – You’ll need to outfit your troops with the best equipment if you hope to survive.

Xenoshyft is a game for 1-4 players, with each player controlling one of the divisions of the Nortec military: The Science Labs, Med Bay, Armory, Weapon’s Research, Barracks and Command Center. Each of these divisions represents one part of the overall Nortec base, and it is your job as Commander of these divisions to protect the base while its field operations are completed.

You and your teammates will have to work together to survive the continuous onslaught of powerful alien threats and horrors – the goal of the mission is not to wipe out these threats, it is merely to outlast them!

Survive through nine rounds of combat with these horrors and the base will have succeeded in its mission, and you and your allies will have survived to fight another day!

Updated on 3rd April 2019

Discover the new expansion and embrace the Forbidden Sciences!

XenoShyft Reviews

A well made game of co-op troop management. Usually we find deck builders to have pasted on theme but this one has mechanics that decently reflect the theme it is trying to convey. Though this is weakened with the psyonics and gen mid expansion a bit we feel. A little practice has us winning easily at 2 division. Game is rather hard at 1 division. The difficulty settings are well gauged with easy being quite easy, normal being a decent challenge and hard being insane. We definitely suggest getting the elites expansion. Its a couple bucks but gives a lot more theme and strategy to the game by allowing surviving troops to level up. Our only complaint involves the UI for activating the expansions you have bought. There are expansions to the base game, an expandalone game, and expansions to that other game. Some of the expansions work with the base game some work on both and some only on the second game. This is the nature of the game, very complicated, but the UI doesnt help at all by explaining the difference between playing Onslaught with the Dreadmire expansion and playing Dreadmire with the Onslaught expansion. Its very confusing with no information to decipher the puzzle.


Has the feel of the old time dungeon crawling alien first person shooters but mix in some deck building action. Love the card designs; enemy units; different weapons. Great game would love an Xbox one port with achievements.


We really like this game as the coop is awesome. But its freaking buggy and theres no way to undo some things you are stuck with it. Its hard so these frustrating broken ai choices it forces you into break the game. Good job on the game, keep at it. Its almost there.


We like the idea of this game. We like the styling of this game. We like the system used by this game. We do not like the balance of this game. We get that the game creators like games that may be impossible to win even even if the player was clairvoyant and used perfect strategy. We dont.


This game looks great and keeps in the spirit of the board game. However, trying to play cards and/or their abilities is atrocious. Typical from Asmodee games on the phone that we have played. Spend more time trying to perform functions and actions than making strategic decisions.


Its gripping. Im buying the board game. But this thing crashed. We were in our way to winning. We dont even think it saved that we were winning, so a total waste of time. Update: crash the second time we played and we did not even switch out of the app. Considering asking for a refund because this is unplayable.


Buttons are tied to animations. So hitting the done button twice too quickly will skip entire phases, bypassing the games own warning prompts. An easy fix to this would be the ability to go back to acquire phase from deploy phase. A few cards need more detail, such as the Prototype Heat Lance Shotgun which doesnt specify that it only targets its own lane. There are also other bugs such as being unable to discard certain cards during wrap-up phase, which ended up costing us a Hard game on the very last round.


We took a chance on this, seeing all of the negative reviews, but the crashing issues are fixed! We had no issues on our iPhone X or iPad Air 2. It requires patience learning how to activate abilities/card effects (play the tutorial). Of course it’s more fun co-op, but solo mode is a blast. This game is alot of fun and very challenging. Good luck!


Updated review for 2.0.2. IPad 4 iOS 10.3.3 – game crashes but after deployment phase.


Game is fantastic, hands down. That’s not in debate. The app is buggy though. You can’t draw any of the free troops to fill your line, and if the screen ever locks, you can’t proceed. It won’t allow item selection when you unlock the screen. Very sad, as this awesome game needs more exposure, bad exposure may kill it prematurely though.


This app has a lot to love, good art and animations, smooth flow, and a good core engine. Too bad no one at CMON apparently ever played this game. This game is beyond hard, in many ways it is impossible to win. One example, in wave one, you could get a combination of two enemies that can nullify most of you attacks, this means in round one, through no fault of your own, you can lost half or more of your bases hp against the easiest wave, and that is just one example. The game is littered with impossible combinations. Once you get the engine down you should be able to get to round 7 consistently, but anything beyond that is all up to the random gods. We even bought some expansions in hopes it would make the game winnable. No luck there. In addition the app is buggy, constantly freezing and forcing you to close, save, and restart. So here is an app that should be getting four or even five stars getting two because CMON doesn’t seem to care. Too bad.


Sure you lose nine out of 10 times when playing the AI, but it’s addictive to try to pick the weapons/first aid/armor/action cards and lay out your troops in order to survive against the relentless aliens. Very high quality production. It appears updates have fixed most issues.


This game shows a lot of promise. Unfortunately, they should have tested it a bit before releasing it, as it is so unbalanced as to be fully unwinnable. If you play perfectly, you can actually make it to the 8th of 9 rounds before the enemy’s extremely over powered cards wipe you out. This is in "easy" mode. They need to rebalance the game. This could be achieved by starting your base with 30 hit points rather than 20. Otherwise, this is like an 80s arcade game, you can never win, you just get as far as you can before you inevitably lose.


Centipedes still don’t work right since they added needing to press "Done" after every stage of combat. Games take forever and the bugs make it unenjoyable. We feel like we’ve given this game enough chances. We can no longer recommend buying this b Great game but SO frustrating that they don’t thoroughly test each release!!!


The tutorial freezes halfway through and nothing will let us continue.


This game is really fun but the multiplayer is basically impossible to finish because of bugs. Also the art is really satisfying.


Great deck building game. We haven’t beat it yet!


Let us start by saying this game has potential- looks pretty stinkin cool. It is incredibly well-designed… Except for the difficulty. The enemies are incredibly hard and upping the base’s health doesn’t help much. We have yet to actually win a game after numerous tries and we actually kindof dread booting it up, as there is this sense that you will always lose. Thus it will be one of those apps that gets lost in the depths of our phone. Save the money (I know we wish we did) and put it toward the board game- at least then you can create house rules that might level the playing field.


Still cannot access expansions if the device is not connected to the internet when the app launches. Please fix, it will make flying so much better…


Clunky interface, terribly glitchy, and local multiplayer controls are unintuitive. The game itself is really fun, but don’t expect to finish every game you start. There is a very real risk of events occurring that the game doesn’t know how to handle, triggering a freeze or an event loop. We’ve only played four games, but while we restarted two in the first wave to check out other divisions, the other two crashed in the last wave. We’re hesitant to give a game as buggy and clunky as this one a rating higher than 1 or 2 stars, but honestly there is a great game lurking under those several aggravating layers, and we can’t help but try and finish a game despite them. Bugs aside, the game has a rather high-quality look to it, and we can tell that a lot of effort has gone into making the game look (and in many cases even feel) good. With a considerable amount of debugging, we could easily see XenoShyft becoming a favorite multiplayer iPad game of ours. Though it just isn’t yet in that state, I’d love to come back and give a more favorable review when this product has had some of the more problematic issues ironed out!


The Good: The game is fun, challenging, and has a lot of strategy. The VO is cool, and the graphics are great. Touch sensitivity seems spot-on. The Bad: The tutorial has a REALLY stupid bug, where they talk about the "DONE" button… But it’s actually a "CANCEL" button (like THAT is intuitive :P). This is an easy fix that should NOT be in a professional level game (especially in a tutorial level). The game was a bit challenging to grasp, until we played the tutorial. Not a big ding for that… But it seems weird not to direct first time players into it first. The difficulty is REALLY high. When the game is on "EASY" it feels "HARD" and doesn’t make us want to even see the "NORMAL" or "HARD" levels. We were playing a 1-lane solo game… But that IS something we can play so the game should scale to match. It doesn’t. Beating someone down on their first try is really disenchanting. We will revisit the game at some future point, and it IS worth getting if you like the theme… Just be aware of what you’re getting yourself into.


Impossible to beat on easy, unintuitive UI, nobody playing multiplayer. Feeling robbed.


Game isn’t even playable cuz it won’t let us click done to move on after they claimed to have fixed it. We want our money back. Actually we would prefer a working app of a great table top game.


But after playing for months we still haven’t got past level 8 and have only reached level 8 once. We’ve gone from thinking this game is a challenge to this game is too frustrating. If ‘easy’ doesn’t get easier in the next patch ( like 5 – 10 more starting points ) then this will go to our ‘ no longer playing ‘ folder for eventual removal. We have several deck builder games on the pad and this is the only one we’ve never beat.


Great game, great deck building / puzzle game, great challenge and neat art. We love "deck building games" and while this may not play exactly like Dominion or Ascension, it has it own style. We’ve been very impressed with it so far, it’s been surprisingly difficult to play a "solo game" on easy mode. The enemy deck is just so tough regardless. It was great learning how the cards resolve and learning how each "division" deck played differently. We would be highly interested in seeing what the expansions add and to be honest this makes us want to buy the all the hard copy cards and play win our friends.


We love the game but not 24 hours after finally picking it up and all the expansions all at once it goes way down in price!


We love deck builders on ipad we own them all. This game looks interesting and it has some good concepts that make it unique. The interface seems super polished at first but after playing the game for a couple hours we realize its pretty clunky. Easy things like activating abilities and choosing targets takes 3 or 4 clicks when you could just drag the card onto the target like many other ipad card games. Supposedly theres this elite demographic of gamers who love super hard games. For us we feel like if a game has modes from easy to hard then easy should at the very least feel achievable. We admit it might be because we don’t know all the nuances and strategies of this game yet but after 4 solo play throughs we get one round into wave 2 and die always. Its frustrating and its not clear what we are doing wrong strategy wise. So 2 stars may be a bit harsh but we feel its fair at this time. The interface while pretty is slow to use and it doesn’t present information in a great way. We think it tries too hard to preserve the table top experience. The game is also unforgivably hard and maybe this could be solved by an advanced strategies tutorial.


Wonderful combination of card and tower defense, highly recommended … Plus it reminds us of the all time great Aliens movie!


1 star reviewer turned Huge fan. These Dev’s really care about this game. They keep adding more great content. They fixed everything we requested in solo play. It is now possible to pass and play as well. We’re hooked!


Outstanding app! We’ve played the board game and fell in love with it. The art is amazing. Lots of fun!


A very fun twist on the deck building game type. The art is amazing well worth a try.


We read some of the other reviews where people were complaining about not being able to pass wave 7. We thought, maybe they don’t understand the mechanics or they didn’t get it. We consider myself a very skilled gamer, and we can’t get past wave 7 either, even on easy. Easy should be easy victory to help you learn the game and eventually take on the real challenges. It would be nice to win once in a while.


We’re glad this hame exists and we’re very glad to see that the developers seem to be regularly updating it. That being said, there are some features missing. No local multiplayer; as of now you can only play solo (one lane) or multiplayer ONLINE. Online multiplayer is good and all, but this game is begging to just have a simple local co-op mode. Or just have solo play with 1-4 lanes. Either works. We’re a huge fan of the board game, and this is a good port. Just needs that one addition.


If you enjoy solo play with 4 players, you will be disappointed like us, this game does not offer that option, which is a basic gameplay mode for any cooperative board game on iOS, hope they fix it in the future, until then 2 stars.


We really like the original board game version. The app falls short in several areas. First and foremost is that your only options of playing are solo as just a single lane or online multi-player. There does not seem to be an option to play solo but as multiple lanes or a pass and play version. While playing there really needs to be a better way to allocate the abilities and\or have a undo feature. Multiple times we use the ability while just trying to read a card. This was most frustrating while during the buy phase when we used a unit to reduce cost or use our class ability to reduce cost of an item. It would reduce the cost on an item that we could not afford, because we were just looking. Crashing, we lost several games when we looked away for a couple minutes and our iPad when to sleep. When we opened it, XenoShyft had lost connection and we had to restart from scratch. Never did we see a continue game option. Card errors. We have to read more carefully but we do not think it is playing the cards correctly. Some of the bring a soldier back from the discard pile to fight for the enemies it would have crazy health and attack. If we had buffed a card, we would not think that would come back. But all of our temp buffs would go with the card. However, we believe it would have even more HP and Attack than what we had buffed. Some of the later cards specifically say that the card moves to the enemy side with their items. But we never read about cards keeping their buffs. Or once a card hits the discard pile, it should not be attached to items or buffs.


Fix the ability to take cards from the discard pile!


We have tried deleting and restarting the ipad as well. It simply will not download. We have tried on two different wifi’s as well.


Ignore our last review we were ignorant. Realized the bug we were having was us not noticing the line around the activated expansions. So new review. Games a little easy. The board game seems to have more strict rules on some areas meaning we haven’t lost a solo game on normal yet (played 3) going to bump it up to hard next play. Would still like to see free play (99 lives) and hardcore (1 life) added. Keep up the good work guys.


This is a good game lets start off with that. We agree with balance issues. One hand you don’t want a game that is always beatable, and on the other it would be nice to win once! We have played over a few dozen times but have yet to last past the 7the round more than once…. To be fair it may be better with more than one player. Pass and play would be ideal since we prefer not to roll the dice with whom we would get with the online game option mode. Our score was going to be a 3 out of 5 stars but realized that even with the game being a little rough around the edges it does not take away from the game play once you understand it. So 4 it is. One important note is we tried to purchase the .99 expansion but apparently it failed as it never seemed to take..?


Awkward control (sigh, 2 finger scrolling), awkward UI, (card tops overlay lanes, enlarge a card and lower right blocked by some solid line that appears-why!?-above the Done button) awkward solo play (I don’t like to play online). People complain it’s unbalanced and we agree, solo play is too difficult but overall the way the game is set up and displayed, it just doesn’t pop. It just doesn’t look and play like a top notch game. Seems like it’s near completion but not quite there yet.


So first off we can see this game being a lot of fun but the game balance is way off. We started off on easy which gives your base 20 hp. You pick a specific group like "barracks" or "med bay" and these give you specific perks such as "reduce the cost of an item card by 1" or "add 2 militia troops at the start of the game". Once you pick then you are usually given 3 or 4 resource points more to spend on either buying more troops or spending on item cards. Usually you only have enough for 2 troops and an item card or 3 troops and no items. The first 3 rounds you only have access to the militia class troop and the ranger. The militia only has 1 hp and does 3 damage while the ranger has 3 hp and does 2 damage. Now you can’t buy militia we’re not sure why and rangers cost 2 resource points. Your pitted against enemies with 1-5 hp and that do 1-5 damage. Some of their abilities include things like "when you are defeated heal yourself by 1 and move to the end of the line" whereas when your troops are defeated they just go away. Another ability the enemy has is " move to the end of the line and grant -1 damage to every friendly in front of you". At some point you’ll get 2 of these guys buffing for -2 damage and being as your troops can only do 2-3 damage you barely scratch them while they destroy your troop. The next round you now have to spend all your resources to buy more troops and have none left over for items to buff you . Not to mention the enemies get stronger and tougher and have better abilities each round. Either give more resources so we can stand a chance or reduce the costs of things so we can afford them. Something needs to be fixed though with the balance and until then this is a 1 star sorry.


Sorry, we try to give games the benefit of the doubt but this games balance is really poor. Single player games are difficult to the point of being cheap (enemy reveal abilities totally outclass your gear in terms of impact on a battle). And other supply cards are either bugged or just worthless (drop ship being one). It really feels like it needed more play testing. We’ve taken this off our mini.


Games performance is abysmal on our iPad. The tutorial is a waste and the is not very balanced. All in all a bad purchase and waste of money.


Great card game and the app makes it very easy to play, keeping all honest on the rules. The multiplayer is a little long and really helps to be in the same room. Typing while playing is difficult. Overall, great scifi game with combat and aliens!


We are unsure why players are complaining over difficulty (solo play) since we can’t imagine the game having longevity if you could beat it a good percentage of the time. For solo play, you must be sure to utilize the different skills of your division as the rounds increase since the number of division abilities climbs as the difficulty does. However they kick off a single card which is sometimes hard to remember to use. Our recommendation is to use the science lab. The second ability allows you to do two damage every time you play a science card which is ridiculous. If any other readers are wanting a leg up, purchase the grafting lab add on. Your first round survival rate is greatly increased with cards like the arm blade which does one auto damage at the beginning of every fight. We beat hard with no damage to our base with Grafting on the first try after a few normal Grafting games. We have defeated hard with Science Lab as well. Although our base only had 4 of 15 hp left. Highly recommended.


We were pretty impressed. We’ve played only a handful of sessions but we really have enjoyed it. We would say the quality of the digital app is pretty good, compared to our expectations of board game apps these days. The mechanics of the game were also pleasantly surprising–the player powers seem kinda weak but make sense in practice. The scaling is also fun, but beware: the enemy can, and will, totally eat your face off if the cards don’t go your way–but that’s a staple of both deck builders and co-op games and isn’t that big of a detractor. We haven’t delved as much into the online multiplayer but look forward to it soon. Do we recommend it? Yep. It’s a well implemented app and a neat take on deck building that keeps us coming back.


This is a great translation to the real game! Solo mode is really tough tho. We can only make it to round 7 so far. It would be nice if they made it to where you can play with NPCs.


Really fun, but there should be something under the options that just shows the whole deck- it’s kind of hard to understand the scope of the game when there isn’t a library to view the cards- that’d be huge for those of us who haven’t played the game before. Thanks!


This is a Grade A game! You start off with a certain amount of militia and resources, and you slowly build up your deck with better guys, bigger guns, and tougher armor to battle increasingly difficult enemies. The game is very tough, but very rewarding. We only hope they will add a button to let us take back a move (sometimes we used a gun without wanting to), but other than that it’s fantastic!


This game is a great translation of the Cool Mini or Not card game of the same name.

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