TOXIKK | a Review
originally published on 13/12/2024;
Hello everyone, I am the mercenary G.E.M.Simov, a sellsword of great renown, capable of wielding guns and high-tech gadgets alike, and I have come to share some of my exploits in this review of “TOXIKK”.
Simple review details - I rank games on an out of 10 basis, granting up to 3 points in 3 categories, as well as a last, single point from my own self, depending on my experience with it.
Gameplay
Toxikk is a First Person Shooter, or, rather, an Arena Shooter. It puts the Player in the shoes of a random Player Character (PC), then puts a number of other Players or Computer Controlled “Players” (AI) on a map, alongside the Player, gives them guns and says: “go”
It’s all about shooting each other, whilst having insane mobility and depending on items strewn about the map to get better Weapons or to replenish one’s resources. In that regard, it is incredibly similar to Quake or Unreal Tournament, and there really is nothing that it does to particularly differentiate itself from those two games.
Well, maybe there is. Arena Shooters put great emphasis on the mobility of the Player Characters in them, as a result of which there is a lot of movement that can be done by the Player in Toxikk. A lot of it, and quickly!
Aside from just walking in the four directions with the WASD keys and jumping with the Spacebar, the Player can also press the Spacebar a second time, when they are at the highest point of their initial jump, to jump a second time. In addition to that, they can either press the Shift button in conjunction with either W,A,S or D to dash in that direction, or they can tap the directional button (either W,A,S or D) to dash.
While dashing, the Player Character (PC) is going to slightly ascend, allowing for the performance of the double jump off of the dash itself. Lastly, while jumping and bumping into a wall, if the Player dashes, their dash covers a huge amount of distance in a very short amount of time, AND the Player can also jump during said dash.
So, the Player has massive amounts of mobility at their fingertips. There is also the opportunity to jump while on an elevator that is moving upwards, which will make the PC fly a lot higher up than a normal jump would. In addition to that, there are explosives (mainly rockets) which can knock a PC up and about, and if timed properly, can be used to perform “rocket jumps”, which are far more powerful than ordinary jumps, but they do deal a bit of damage to the PC.
Lastly, there is a jetpack “Pick-Up” that can be used to further increase movement options, but it is not present in most of the Arenas that are on offer, as a result of which it’s not too commonly used. There are also jump pads that propel the PC upwards, but they’re misleading as they do not actually just bump the PC up, they guide it in a specific direction and take away a decent amount of control from the Player, so that the PC will end up wherever the jump-pad means for it to go.
With all of that said, this game seems to be more of a parkour experience than a shooter experience, and while that can be considered true - as there is a lot of merit to properly using the mobility options at the Player’s disposal to cover ground faster or to reach otherwise unreachable Power-Ups and Pick-Ups - the main aspect still is the shooting.
Toxikk offers the Players a number of weapons, with each having a secondary form of fire (via the use of the Right Mouse Button, with the Left Mouse Button being the normal means of firing). Unfortunately, there is only one weapon that allows for aiming down the sights. Regardless, there is a decent amount of variety - a melee weapon that’s more of a gimmick than anything particular, a pistol, two assault rifles, a sniper rifle, a shotgun, a flamethrower, a rocket launcher and a nuke.
The secondary modes of fire that the weapons present are nothing too special - the shotgun fires more bullets, one of the assault rifles fires a grenade, the pistol fires a burst of bullets, the sniper rifle can be aimed down. The fun stuff comes from using them to kill other Player Characters.
But is shooting the only goal? Well, not quite. There are 3 game modes in Toxikk - one is a deadmatch, either between two teams or in a massive free-for-all with however many players are playing, and whoever gets to a certain number of kills first wins. The second is a “capture the flag” gamemode, in which the teams each have an object they must defend and the other team tries to steal it, with the winner being whoever steals the object three times. The third gamemode is centered around holding certain locations - which are captured by walking over them - until one team accumulates 100 points.
Lastly, there’s one more thing that the Player can do while in a match of Toxikk - they can go invisible for a brief period of time by pressing the Q button. There is no requirement for whether or not this can be done, it is not bound to a Pick-Up or a Power-Up, it’s just something that every Player Character can do.
So, the fun in Toxikk comes from running around, jumping and dashing, and shooting at others. This can be done in multiplayer, against other Players or against AI, or in singleplayer, against AI and with AI. There are also 12 “Contracts” that the Player can do, which act as a pseudo Campaign and an introduction to the game.
The first Contract is literally the tutorial, while the remainder of them slowly increases its difficulty by 1 (roughly) until the Player faces the toughest challenge possible on the 12th Contract. Those are loosely tied to an interesting thing that Toxikk does, and that is the way it calculates the Player’s ability to play the game… Properly? It supposedly figures out how good, or how skilled a Player is and applies a Skill Class (SC).
The SC goes from 1 to 12, with 12 being the highest amount of skill that can be had and 1 being the lowest. It’s based on how a Player moves during matches, how accurate they are and how many kills compared to deaths they get. It’s very smart, and also spectacularly magnificent, for it will match the Player with an SC of 5 with other Players who have an SC of 5, with possible SC 4 or SC 6 Players.
Well, the Player gets into a match and plays. They walk through the Pick-Ups and collect guns, use those guns, run out of ammo, find ammo, shoot, get shot at, find Health packs or Shields and then get back into the fight. Toxikk is incredibly fast paced, with everything being based around moving - as a result of which, the way to get anything is to move.
The PC is randomly spawned somewhere on the Map, which is limited to the area that their object is in for the “capture-the-flag” gamemode, and they need to find a weapon. Those float on special pedestals and are picked up by being run into. Then, the Player might want to get some Ammo, as they get their weapon with only 40% of its ammo capacity filled out, which might be enough for one or two fights, but then there’s going to be a pronounced lack of resources.
Health and Shields can also be picked up by running over them, as they are strewn about and float enticingly around the map, as are bits of ammo. Here’s the neat part about it - the Player starts off with 120 Health and 0 Shields. Shields are a lot rarer than Health, in Pick-Up form, but they are very valuable, as they essentially increase the amount of damage the PC can take before dying.
There are three sizes of Health or Shield Pick-Up - small, medium and large. Medium Health Pick-Ups are very easy to find, but they do not heal the PC over 100. That creates incentive for the Player to run around to find Pick-Ups with which to increase their Health and Shields, because the more of those the Player has, the better.
And the more the Player runs around, the more likely they are to run into an enemy Player, which will result in gameplay occurring. What the designers behind Toxikk have done, which is very cheeky, is that they’ve put down small Pick-Ups along a number of pathways, and then they have put down Ammo Pick-Ups almost everywhere else, interspersed with Weapon Pick-Ups or bigger Health or Shield Pick-Ups, thus allowing the Player to always feel as though they are doing something.
There are no stretches of downtime, as the Player is always moving and always collecting things in preparation for the next gunfight. The arenas feel quite dense as a result of that, even if they are not actually that dense, which is a nice feeling to have while playing a game like this. Of course, whenever the number of PCs and/or AIs in a match is low, the map ought to be small to accommodate and to not allow for long periods of running around like a headless chicken in search of others. Fortunately, Toxikk does not have an issue with that, as the Arenas in it are quite well designed.
Overall, it would appear that Toxikk is a very competently made Arena Shooter that focuses on that. However, there are also vehicles. In what seems to be a bout of madness, the folks making Toxikk have decided to add vehicles, and not just cars - there are whole mechs that fire heavy machine guns and launch homing missiles, there are bomber planes and…
Those are more of a novelty than a mainstay, as they are present in only some of the maps, and then they are very oppressive in the maps that they are present in, particularly the mechs. The other vehicles are also very strong, but they are not too impossible to deal with - they have surprisingly small amounts of health for the type of thing they are (again, the mechs - they go down pretty easily).
Now, with this oddity out of the way, there are some bad things about Toxikk. First and foremost, the way the PCs are spawned on the maps is horrible, especially when it comes to the Free-For-All mode, because the Player can be spawned within less than 2 seconds of movement from another Player.
The Player can also be spawned next to a spot where a Weapon Pick-Up should be, but that Weapon has already been picked up and, as a result of that, the Player has no Weapon (aside form the pistol, which is very weak by comparison to the other Weapons) against the other Players, one of whom has very recently gotten a good Weapon and is within such a small distance that they might show up in two seconds.
The spawning also works oddly in the other gamemodes - sometimes the PC will spawn right in the room where the thing that needs to be defended is, other times the PC will spawn at fifteen seconds of movement away from that room. Again, they might spawn next to a Weapon Pick-Up that has been picked up, and they might spawn right on top of an enemy. Fortunately, there is a tiny window - around a single second - of invincibility that the PC has when it spawns, though that does not really do anything and does not really allow for much to be achieved. If you’re a sitting duck, you are a sitting duck.
Aside from that… The AI cheats, and that is very unpleasant. Now, the lower difficulty AIs cheat by only ignoring the fact that the Player is using the cloak - to the AI, there is no cloak for the Player, but they will use it to become completely invisible and come out of nowhere to kill the Player’s Character.
They also have a lengthier window of invulnerability than the Player controlled Character. They are also a lot more likely to mysteriously have more Health than the usual 120, or they might have some amount of Shields as they spawn in.
The higher difficulty AI cheats far more - by always knowing where the Player is. When the AI is at SC 7 or higher, there is never a chance to get the jump on it - fortunately, the AI can still miss at that difficulty level, so the Player must spray and pray. That’s not fun - especially considering that the AI will always find itself targeting the Player over other AIs, even if said AIs are on the Player’s team.
It gets to the point of the AIs getting headshots on the Player, when the Player shows up for half a second in the AI’s field of view, WHILE the AI is fighting another AI. Those aren’t just lucky headshots - those are the AI turning at 180 degrees, firing a single shot and instantly pulverizing the PC before turning around and mysteriously becoming a lot more inept at aiming when trying to hit the other AI.
This is most problematic in Contracts, but it can also be very difficult to deal with in training matches, and, as a result, will not actually be that conducive to learning and improving at the game. After all, how is one meant to improve when the enemies all have both wall-hacks and aim-hacks?
Lastly, there is a progression system in the game, which takes the Player from rank 1 to rank 16. Each rank allows the Player to unlock new cosmetic items, such as different camos, armor types and helm types. None of those affect gameplay in the slightest, but it is neat that there is a progression system… Until it becomes anything but that. The rate at which ranks are ascended is very reasonable, at first, but the higher in rank the Player goes, the more gruesome the process of ascending becomes.
This is quite unpleasant, as playing the game for such extended periods of time so as to get to the last rank is unnervingly grueling, especially considering that the points that lead to one’s ascendance are tied to how many times the Player has performed special things - such as killing the Player that killed them, getting a large number of kills without dying (up to 24, which grants 200 points) or winning by such a landslide that the enemy team essentially did not get to play the game.
That’s just not nice.
Aside from that, though, the game is a very pleasant experience. Unfortunately, it has a very small number of Players on Steam, as a result of which it is best to bring a couple of Friends to play with. It might even be more fun that way. 2/3
Presentation
To play Toxikk, the Player needs to read, and agree to, an End USer License Agreement that takes more than 30 seconds to scroll through with the mouse wheel. Reading it takes, predictably, more than 30 minutes. That’s already a horrible step towards a bad Presentation, but there’s room for redemption.
Unfortunately, the game keeps making missteps - the font that it uses is such that numbers and letters look identical. The main culprits are S being literally the same as 5 and O being indistinguishable from 0. That’s not good at all.
Another problem - the Contracts all start with an infinite panning set of shots of the map, which never ends. There is a prompt to skip, but if the call to action is to “skip”, that implies that the thing that is going to get skipped has an end, and the Player will just fast forward to the end. However, these panning shots of the map never end - they constantly loop, while loud music plays and destroys the Player’s eardrums.
As is nearly customary, this game is too loud. The music is too loud (by default), the sound effects are also quite loud, by default, and lowering their volume does not truly alleviate the issue. However, there is also something else that’s very odd. Whereas the hitmarker in most games is accompanied by a thump-esque sound, in Toxikk hitting someone with a weapon produces an ear-shatteringly loud screech that lasts for less than a second.
This is somewhat obtuse - due to the fact that a screech of that nature is similar to an alarm going off, and whenever an alarm goes off it indicates something bad. The fact that the hitmarker sound, which is generally the most beloved thing in this kind of game, as it indicates that a target has been hit, has been transformed into this hideous screech is very unpleasant and almost acts as a sort of punishment for hitting a target, when it should be a reward.
Well, in truth it is a bit of a reward (if it could be so said) because the pitch of the screech (which is actually more like a beep, but hearing it constantly turns it into a screech) changes depending on the severity of the damage dealt. Headshots have a different beep when compared to bodyshots.
However, the music is very passable. It is techno-synth noise that works well for the setting - futuristic combat arenas and such - without being too intrusive.
There is little in the way of voice-acting, aside from grunts and a few announcements made by an announcer in regards to a match’s development. An oddity is present in the fact that falling from a height great enough to deal damage makes the Player Character start breathing heavily, as though in pain. The oddity is that this stacks, and falling and taking fall damage before the heavy breathing concludes starts another heavy breathing sound on top of the previous, creating a great cacophony.
Other than those things, however, things are not too bad. The game looks very respectable, presenting neat and interesting 3D environments to run around it while shooting other goons. One of the more intriguing things is that the game presents a tutorial, but that tutorial focuses extremely intensely on movement, while leaving shooting and anything related to it out of the tutorial nearly completely. That’s… That’s very problematic, because it indicates the game expects the Player to already know how to play the game… Yet there is a tutorial.
Another unfortunate issue is that some maps are too dark - those that take place indoors or outdoors but at night - and that’s self explanatory.
However, with everything considered, the game is actually quite well presented, even if there are fields that it could be improved in. 2/3
Story
There is some story in Toxikk. It is, however, all in small snippets of text preceding Contract missions, as a result of which the amount of story is so small it’s almost negligible. There’s a bit of information regarding who the Player Character is, regarding their employers, but then there’s nothing else. There’s also some world-building that goes on, but it is related to some future Earth (not too distant in the future) with corporations and private security contractors running rampant.
Nothing too interesting. In fact, it’s so little that the game presents its story twice, in different text boxes, all on the same screen, as if in an attempt to mislead the Player into believing there’s more than there actually is. Unfortunately that, which is present, is not something spectacular. 1/3
Legendary Point
Does this game get the legendary point, so craved and wanted by all and none at the same time? While the game itself is fun to play, the fact that the AI is so blatantly cheating bothers me to no ends and really lessened my enjoyment of Toxikk, as I simply had to complete all 12 Contracts as totally as possible. That brought… Pain in my wrists. As a result of that, NO, I am not going to give Toxikk the Legendary Point. 0/1
Conclusion
5/10. This is what a perfectly average game should be like. It is fun enough to play, it features enough to keep the Player entertained for a decent amount of time, and it also allows for some fun times with friends. If you’re a fan of Arena Shooters, give it a go. If you like FPS games, I’d also urge you to give it a go - it is free to play!
I tuck it away in the bag of mediocrity, thinking to myself that if all the games within were like Toxikk, it would be the bag of satisfaction, not mediocrity!