Noxious

Dead Space managed to reinvigorate the survival horror space with its science-fiction theme and a sense of palpable dread, thanks to a great atmosphere and the necromorph threat. Now, a team of students from the Full Sail University decided to pay an homage to that series, creating Noxious, a game offering intense action but sadly not the same fear that instilled from the Electronic Arts’ series. Since Dead Space 2 went more to the action side and Dead Space 3 seems to despise the horror factor even more, we could say that Noxious just followed the path of its inspiration.

In Noxious, a free third-person shooter for PC, you play as Future Sight Industries’ Dr. Nathaniel Stryder, the last survivor of a terrible experiment that managed to trap all the scientists until they died one by one. In a gesture of despair, Stryder leaves his shelter – the same that would become his grave – and decides to fight for his life against multiple alien creatures. Stryder quickly grabs his futuristic suit (another obvious Dead Space reference) and a gun, the X-Rifle. Expect to travel through industrial environments with the goal of redirecting all power to a huge laser cannon and thus opening the path to salvation – and apparently setting all creatures free to the world to rampage everything in their way, but we’ll leave that to an unlikely sequel.

The main weapon fires simple lasers and heat-seeking missiles and the suit also has a useful shield. All of these regenerate after a few seconds of use. There’s not much variety to the enemies, but some big brutes will give us a lot of trouble, especially during the final five minutes, where we have to escape before time runs out and all the complex is swamped by poisonous gas.

Comparisons to Dead Space are inevitable and Noxious obviously suffers from it, but things have to be put in context. As a freeware game, this is technically accomplished and offers some fun during the 30 minutes that the story lasts. However, the difficulty level is well balanced and it will take a few tries before we get Dr. Nathaniel Stryder (and the rest of the creatures, probably) to the open world.

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