Anoxenia is an underwater survival/puzzle game in which you take control of a deep-sea diver and his robotic assistant to solve puzzles, collect oxygen and power to survive.
General Gameplay
The game is all about exploration while maintaining your resources (Oxygen and Energy) up while going from area to area using the tools that you have to search your surroundings and progress in the game. The Game Visuals are in a darker blues and black color tones in which the game is giving a sense of being underwater, there is not many colors that the game is shown in. The game details are just silhouette of the main character and just some detail to the robot. There are levels in which enemies and other objects are shown but they are just basic design to give the player an idea on what the environment is. As the game does not have a colorblind mode, it is not needed as the graphics are shown without any issues. During our test we did not see much that would be to frighten gamers that are pre-teen or teen age. We did not test this game with younger gamers as this is a M rated title. The Audio of the game is with its basic underwater sounds. There is spoken dialog from the perspective of the main character as he will narrate his journey in the game. There is minimum background music and that when the game reaches those points of high tension it will play music. In our play through we did not even remember hearing much in the background music but the sound effects in the game were not memorable what so ever. Controls for Anoxenia is where it is more of a point and click style but where it falls very short on the console. The game control setup is around moving with the left thumb stick and the face buttons controls the drone interactions. There is no need for a special controller and the game is fine to play with the standard console controller. During our playtest, our gaming family had a lot of trouble controlling the game (more on this in our family friendly section) and were not able to play the game.
“Anoxemia tries to create an underwater survival feel through the graphics of the game but it just falls short on so many places.”
Family Friendly
As we were doing our playtesting of the game, we ran into a lot of issues in which that did not sit well with us, one of those were the controls of the game. In our special needs testing, the controls of the game and how it controlled on the screen was a big issue. Just trying to get the game character to move around was a challenge and that most if not all of our game testers were just frustrated with the game. Also, the gameplay was very boring, as with any puzzle/resource management types of games there is a lot of repetitive style of gameplay but with Anoxemia it just seems that it was the same thing over and over. Also, the overall gameplay was just dull as many of the testers just got bored of the game after an hour of playing. One of the reasons why we cannot recommend this game for special needs gamers is because of the controls in the game. We advise that it is best to rent and try the game first before making a purchase.
Closing
Anoxemia is just a boring game that does not offer much to the gamer. With bad controls it just falls short in a genre in which that there are better games out there. Avoid at all cost.
