OTXO is atop-down rogueliteaction shooter that puts you in the shoes of a masked gunman shooting his way through a Mansion of full lethal, heavily armed enemies and unraveling the mysteries of why he’s there.
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Like most roguelikes and roguelites,you get a small tutorial before you’re sent into danger, left to figure out some of the finer nuances of the game for yourself. You’re meant to find out most of it through trial and error, and lots and lots of deaths. Fortunately, we’ve got your back with some things you should know before starting OTXO.
8Reloading Is Realistic
In most shooters, you have guns with ammo in the magazine and the rest of your ammo is in a pool waiting to be used. When you reload, you draw from this pool to fill in any missing ammunition from the magazine.
In real life and in OTXO, this is not the case. When you reload, you discard any unused shots and you put in a new magazine. To make maximum use of a gun, you have to empty it out before reloading. This doesn’t apply to some shotguns since they are reloaded one shell at a time, usually into an internal magazine that does not come out.
7Hand-To-Hand Basics
With so many guns on hand, you might scoff at some melee combat, but it’s still important to keep in mind that your kick isn’t just a tool to open doors. Kicking does a lot of damage, enough to one-shot most non-boss enemies and is completely silent. It also has a short enough cooldown that you can double kick an opponent to death.
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You can kick as a last resort if you run out of ammo, rolling into an enemy and punting them will usually net a kill. If you want to be proactive in your kung-fu, the Focus mechanic is generous enough that if you use it right, you could slow down time and Kick all the enemies in early rooms to death without shooting. There’s even an achievement for doing that.
6There Are Plenty Of Guns
While ammo mechanics are important to keep in mind, so is the fact that there are a lot of guns in this game. So many guns that any given firearm is disposable to the point that you don’t even get ammo, just new guns.
So feel free to pick up fallen guns at will, especially since you can’t keep using the same ones once they’re out of magazines. In fact, reloading takes so long sometimes that, if there’s a nearby weapon to grab, you’re better off grabbing it — unless you’ve already used it, it will be fresh and fully loaded.
5Contribute To The Bar
At the beginning of each run and every few rooms, you’ll find yourself at the Bar. The bartender will offer a complimentary performance-enhancing Liquor at the start of a run and for coin later, provided you put down your weapon when talking to him.
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Just as enigmatic is the lady on the opposite side of the room who will offer to import new Liquors for the Bar, provided you pay her to do it. An important thing to note is that you don’t have to pay all at once for this service. Just pay down whatever tipple catches your fancy across multiple runs and, when it’s paid for, you get a bottle on the house for that run and that drink will now have a chance to appear among the Bartender’s selection. If you have the extra coin, consider depositing some with the lady. You lose it all when you die, anyway…
4But Keep A Little Coin On Hand
…but, you should hold on to a little bit of that money, especially if you’re confident that you’re going to win the next firefight. Not only can you save up for fancier drinks for future Bar visits, but, on your travels, you might end up at a Misplaced Room.
Misplaced Rooms are mysterious places that are out of place within the mansion, seemingly depicting a scene from someone’s past. In addition to having a bit of lore tucked away in the room,there are also gacha dispensersthat accept your coin. For 250 coins, you have a shot at getting something for the Deviant’s collection or, more importantly, a new firearm to find in the Mansion.
3Get Risky To Score High
To earn coins, you need to splatter enemies, and you earn more coins if you may keep your combo high. Your combo is a multiplier of incoming coins, and to keep it high, you’ll need to kill enemies back to back. If you don’t, you’ll lose your combo, and you’ll have to start over.
However, the Mansion seems to thrive not just on the thrill of back-to-back kills, but on the novelty of those kills. If you stick with the safe route of using Focus to kill every enemy, you’ll have plenty of health at the end of the level, but it’s rare that you’ll get the combo meter past x3.
A reliable but risky way to get into x4, x5, and even x6 territory is to kill enemies out of Focus. There are other ways to juice your combo meter as well, such as melee kills, quick multi-kills, changing up your weaponry, or just plain old precision and accuracy.
2Explore The Beach Occasionally
You start OTXOwaking up on a beach, and you’ll likely end up there quite a few times before you’re through. While the Mansion is the main attraction, explore the grounds a bit before starting on your rampage.
You’ll meet some more of OTXO’s colorful cast of characters as well as a shooting range to play with the guns. Once you get back into the Mansion, return to the beach once in a while — you’ll find that you might have unlocked a new functionality, or at least some new lore.
1Consider Some Stealth
In a game where the only way to open doors is by kicking them down and then proceeding to get into someJohn Wick firefightsimmediately after, you wouldn’t think that stealth is an option. And while for the most part it isn’t, OTXO has some stealth-adjacent mechanics to consider.
Enemies actually have sight and hearing that you may take advantage of. In general, if they’re facing away from you, they can’t see you and won’t shoot at you. They can also hear gunfire, but not from silenced weapons or while you’re under the effect of certain Liquors.
This isn’t useful when they’re near a door when you kick it, but they’re not always in that position when you do. Something else to keep in mind is that, as long as you don’t break a door to a room, enemies won’t hear or see the action going on beyond it.
