This game is a new take on the old Star Fox from the SNES days. If you are not familiar with Star Fox, the big idea at the time was to have an action game in 3D (in the early 90s that meant polygons with some gouraud shading if you were lucky) running on the 16 bits Super Nintendo, something that the console was not really made for. So to get around a super weak system, they had to add an additional processor, the SuperFX chip, inside the cartridge to accelerate 3D calculations and make it work.

A few other games ended up using that chip at the time, but Star Fox is the most well-known example. And don’t get me wrong, even with the SuperFX chip, the graphics actually looked pretty bad and the framerate was atrocious. I remember that we Amiga owners were looking at that in 1993 and laughing our asses off. Star Fox had like 150 polygons on screen max, and could not manage to go faster than 15 fps most of the time, with a very low visibility (clipping, my friends!). Your ship was just a set of triangles and buildings large bars with 6 sides. It was barebones. Sometimes nostalgia is just that! Technically, it was a disaster on wheels and it was hardly a proof that the SuperFX chip was a great feature. Despite all that, the gameplay was good enough, it was kind of fun, and that saved it from the oblivion of time.

The gist is the game is simple. What if we turned the arcade 2D shooters of the 80s into 3D ones, without changing the underlying concept? You can move around a bit, but ultimately the world scrolls towards you, in 3D this time around. So you get to fly a future fighter ship in third-person view mode, moving forward in a single direction, with enemies and obstacles coming at you.

While things are in 3D, you don’t have a complete freedom of movement. You are instead stuck in a cubic space in which you can move left, right, up, down, and back and forth a little. In other words, it’s a modern form of a 2D shoot’em up where the 2D boundaries were the left and right side of the screen, albeit with a third dimension. Some people like to call this a rail shooter, but I disagree, since in the 90s we also called stuff like Rebel Assault rail shooters, with no freedom of movement at all and every scene precalculated and read from a CD-ROM as a video file - the only freedom you had is to point at which sprites to shoot at on screen. Putting Star Fox in the same category feels extreme. I’d rather call Star Fox a 3D shoot’em up.

RETRO NOUVEAU

What was true for Star Fox is true for Ex-Zodiac since it’s a recreation of the original concept, lacking only the official branding and a publisher that likes to send lawyers on everything that moves.

In Ex-Zodiac, everything is made to look retro (think early 90s), and that includes the soundtrack. And it works surprisingly well. And it’s made in Godot! Another reason to talk about it. Fundamentally, what I mentioned above related to Star Fox is pretty much the same in Ex-Zodiac. Except that you have humans as heroes instead of animals. One of the key differences is that Star Fox made you feel part of a team, with some teammates flying other ships along with you and making an appearance on screen once in a while. In here, it’s not the case, you are the sole fighter and you will defeat all enemies by yourself. In that sense, Star Fox was a little more cinematic, while Ex-Zodiac focuses only on the gameplay. In the same line of thought, Star Fox had more background and a stronger storyline, while in Ex-Zodiac this feels like something added at the end after everything else. It does not really matter either way. You are here to blast things after all!

Unlike some of the hardest shooters out there, you don’t die when you are hit once, instead you have a proper life bar that allows for some damage to occur before you are shot down. It’s a necessity in a 3D environment where distances and directions are a lot more difficult to evaluate.

Your weapons are fairly limited. This is not one of these shooters where you have dozens of different beams taking care of cleaning everything on screen. Your most basic weapon is some kind of laser beam, that can you power up if you grab a little box called laser as you fly around. If you keep the button pressed down, you can activate the missiles: before launching the missiles, you need to aim at enemies on screen to lock the missiles on them, and the longer you wait to release the button, the more missiles will be released. This is a gameplay mechanic: either you choose to use your laser and shoot as often as you can, or you take a risk to be vulnerable for a few seconds before sending missiles blazing in with great accuracy. Ideally, you’ll do both.

To avoid things coming your way you can move your ship around, but you can also do barrel rolls left or right to make it more difficult for enemies to target you.

The game lets you visit different places one level after the other: you start with a grassy planet, then you go into an asteroid field in space, then an icy planet, then something that looks like a Egyptian desert… and in each level the enemies differ in their look and behavior. The obstacles in the environment are great: buildings, falling windmills or poles, moving walls, boring machines that pierce through the floor or roof of caverns… some of the ideas are inspired from Star Fox but there’s a lot of new takes on the genre too.

In any case, EX-Zodiac is a fairly faithful rendition of a Star Fox-like game, and it has clearly identified what makes it fun: you get waves of different enemies with different shooting patterns, obstacles coming your way in different shape and form, and huge bosses at the end of each level. It’s fast, the controls are super responsive, and while the graphics look dated on purpose, it’s very easy to read what is happening on screen at all times.

The difficulty follows a good learning curve. I could not beat the first boss the first time, but after 2-3 tries I was able to pass that level and finish the second level not too long after. Even if you end up with a game over, the game lets you restart at the most recent unlocked level, which is very forgiving. Games in the 90s were not that kind!

There’s not much to add. It’s a simple game, but really well-made. It’s not too long either so you can finish it in one sitting if you are good enough.

MADE FOR THE STEAM DECK

It works perfectly on the Steam Deck at the lowest TPU settings (3W) at 60 FPS, which means it’s well optimized (it’s expected for what is displayed on screen, but I have seen countless 2D games struggling to stay at 60 FPS so…). And you would not know that it’s made with Godot - it does not look like a generic game at all (even the menus were properly customized). The controls are excellent and the text remains readable, always. Good stuff.

I published a small video review below so if you want to see things in action, check it out:

Since we really enjoyed it, it goes right into our list of recommended games. If you are interested to grab it, you can find it on Steam right now.

Note: we were offered a key from the publisher to review this game.