The 2010s marked a golden age in “do it yourself” video game sequels. Everyone from experienced creators to indie developers seemed to realize at once that if their favorite series seemed to be dead on the vine, they could go ahead and make their own follow-up version.
20XX is arguably one of the most successful examples thereof. If you missed it, 20XX is a challenging action-platformer that takes most of its inspiration from Mega Man X, all the way down to looking like an SNES game, but adds co-op play and roguelike mechanics where you have to finish the entire game on a single life.
According to its creator, Batterystaple Games’ Chris King, 20XX did “better than it had any right to.” Naturally, that led to the launch of 30XX, a sequel set a thousand years later, on Steam Early Access in February of 2021.
According to King, speaking to me from his booth at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle, 20XX had left him and his team with “a lot they still wanted to do.” The sequel is intended to push this style of game further than before, with more bosses, weapons, power-ups, and a full visual overhaul, with new sprites created by Glauber Kotaki (Vampire Survivors, Rogue Legacy 2).
At time of writing, 30XX is fully playable via Steam Early Access, but its story is essentially invisible. Both Nina and Ace are back, and fully playable from the start, with the same specialties they had before; Nina is once again the Mega Man/Rock/X of the series, with a focus on long-distance firepower, while Ace is a fast-moving melee/combo character who regenerates energy by dealing damage.
Unlike 20XX, it features two modes of play from the start. By default, it plays much like the original game did, where you have one life with which to make it all the way through the game in a randomized, procedurally-generated order.
You can also opt to play through the game on “Mega Mode.” While you still get procedurally generated stages, 30XX will generate a single seed for you right at the start of the game and stick with it throughout. Death will simply send you back to the level select screen to try again, spending two different currencies to gradually power up your character. It’s a lot more like a classic Mega Man experience, hence the name.
More specifically, it’s a lot more like the later games in the Mega Man X series, which as you may remember were extremely difficult. While it’s possible to grind your way past a few challenges in Mega Mode, since you keep your earned currencies if you die or quit out of a stage, the game’s still designed to test your reflexes, skill, and pattern recognition.
Each boss you manage to bring down comes with their own new weapon, which usefully expands your bag of tricks. At the start of the game when you’ve just got a basic sword or blaster, it’s as tough as it’ll ever be, but I found the curve smoothed out a bit once I’d gotten the Crystal Wave (low damage, but temporarily freezes enemies into bricks) and Negation Pulse (a short-range 360-degree blast that can hit enemies above or below you).
Nina can also combine weapons on her inventory screen to turn them into more expensive but highly damaging super-nukes. Essentially, each weapon has its primary fire, and then has a passive ability that you can transfer to another weapon via the Fusion menu.
For example, the Crushing Void is “just” a short-ranged gravitational nuke, but it can also be used to amplify the effect of another weapon. Negation Pulse on its own is barely arm’s length, but Negation Pulse + Crushing Void hits almost the entire screen for massive damage.
Ace, conversely, can carry every weapon he gets, but can only equip one at a time. Instead of new weapons, he unlocks new sword techniques by defeating bosses, and can have all 9 of them active simultaneously. He’s more versatile than Nina, but also more complicated to play.
Once again, 30XX features an assortment of Augments – short-term buffs found in each stage that give you a bonus until the end – and Core Augments, which are permanent upgrades. You have a small number of Core Points to spend on the latter, however, which can provide game-changing benefits: health regeneration on enemy kills, easier energy regeneration, alterations to your basic attack like a wave-shaped beam, or the ability to shoot/slash enemy projectiles out of the air.
The most recent update for 30XX at time of writing, 0.42, is about adding “weird narrative secrets,” according to King, such as hard-to-find lore capsules scattered throughout the levels which shed some light on the game’s actual story. 0.42 also added several new characters, challenges, play modes, and an in-game tutorial.
King also says that his team, currently up to 6 developers, has no roadmap in place for when 30XX will reach version 1.0. It’s not likely, however, that that will be the final version of the game.
