20XX review

written 2026-10-15

20XX is a fighter-platformer roguelike inspired by Megaman that I played in 2026, with runs about 1 hour long. I played for more than 100 hours, and my overall opinion is it's excellent.

Core mechanics

Your core moveset is very simple: a basic attack with hold-to-charge, jump, wall jump, and "dash", which doesn't go very far on the ground, but if you jump during it, you can move super fast and keep the dash state until your jump ends. You can also dash-jump from a wall. Finally, you can find secondary weapons called powers which use a special meter.

There's an ergonomic problem with basic attacks: it does very quick 3-hit combos but each hit needs a separate button press, so you mash the button a lot. And one of the two playable characters, Nina, also has no delay between combos at close range, worsening this.

Related, bosses have a mechanic where being hit with a basic attack makes them briefly invulnerable to anything except the same combo. It seems like the only reason is to balance Nina's unlimited fire rate at close range, but it hurts other things: it prevents you from using basic attacks and powers together against bosses.

So there's a few minor issues with core mechanics, but level design is what makes the game great. Levels are randomly generated, from handmade sections with some variables tweaked and connected seamlessly, and enemies placed amid platforming challenges in ways that pose interesting tactical challenges about how to approach them safely.

This extends to the bosses, all of whom involve platforming and have movesets well-designed for replayability, since they constantly create new situations even when using the same moves, thanks to positional state. The last two in particular are very elaborate, with large movesets and hazards they can deploy a combination of.

If you finish a level fast enough, you get extra rewards at the end. This is a nice incentive to not be too careful, but it's balanced so it's still usually worth exploring the whole level to find upgrades.

Building

Upgrades mostly come in the form of finding augments which increase stats or have special effects. You don't get a choice when a chest drops an augment, but you also find money throughout levels, and a shop, which spawns on most of them, lets you choose from 3 augments to buy. This is the main place where you get build choices.

There is a slight luck problem with augments: some are strictly better versions of others. In shops, these are balanced by costing more, but they can also be found randomly, where they aren't balanced at all. Some items also scale in value drastically based on when you find them, like one that gives you full health.

The most important kind of augments are core augments, which are like equipment pieces. You can have one at a time for head, body, arms, and legs, and each has special effects. The leg augs give movement abilities like a double jump or air dash. I like the leg augments in particular because they lead to different playstyles and different solutions to the same levels, while the rule that you can't have more than one a time prevents them from trivializing levels, and they're all about equally good.

My only issue with core augments is that often they lead to useless rewards. If you go through an optional challenge for a chest and it contains a core augment for a slot you already have and you don't like it as much, then you got nothing.

The other main place you get build choices is boss rewards. Each one drops a choice between a power based on the boss's attacks, 10 money, or a random augment.

I think these latter two choices are well balanced. Even the cheapest augs in the shop cost 12, but the 10 money lets you choose what to spend it on, and you might find an augment for sale better than the one offered here. But I think the powers are not so well balanced; half of them are amazing and I want them every run, and half the remainder are useless.

Many powers have special interactions with certain enemies or objects, like being able to disable certain environmental hazards. These are cool, but suffer from undiscoverability because they require doing things you have no reason to try unless you already know them. I would have never learned some of these interactions without looking them up.

The last type of upgrade is rare "prototypes", which are very powerful but have big downsides. Sadly, most prototypes' tooltips don't explain what they do, not even qualitatively, and worsening this, some have such big downsides that they effectively kill you instantly: one makes you take *triple* damage.

Routing

At the end of each level you get 3 options for your next level. You have to do all 8 of them eventually, but you have some control over the order. A few considerations go into this: avoiding stuff you're unprepared for, doing bosses that give good powers early, and doing dangerous bosses early to avoid their upgraded versions. Each boss scales with the level number, and they slightly outscale you so bosses you fight later tend to be harder.

Each boss is weak to a certain other boss's power, they take more damage from it and sometimes other effects. This adds to deciding which bosses you're prepared for, but it suffers because there's no in-game way to find out who's weak to what, except trial and error. It's not intuitive or even hinted at in their lore entries.

But even besides the power weaknesses, I think the game does a good job designing levels and bosses to encourage different builds. For example, some bosses especially reward having a movement upgrade, some especially reward having a weapon or power that can hit at certain angles, and some reward having specific powers other than their weakness. And sometimes the level leading up to a boss affects what you want even more than the boss itself.

Meta progression

The biggest problem with 20XX is its rampant meta progression. You collect "soul chips" from special enemies during runs, which you spend between runs on items that affect future runs. There are three things you can buy:

Permanent upgrades - stuff to start with every run, but only on normal and easy mode.

Next run items - stuff to start with next run.

Unlocks - adds items to the pool that can be randomly found during runs. Most roguelikes have an unlock system like this, but 20XX is worse because it starts with such a tiny subset and takes so long to unlock them all, and unlocking an item also gives it to you for free next run.

None of these mechanic belong in a roguelike, and I've elaborated why:

Most roguelikes misuse unlocking

Luckily, you can prevent unlocks giving you the item for free (without affecting your run history) by quitting and reloading the hub area after buying them. This seems like a bug, because after doing this it still shows them in your inventory in the hub, but they won't come into the run.

Multiplayer

20XX supports both local and online multiplayer, but the implementation is mediocre.

Firstly, the game simply isn't a great fit for multiplayer because of the linear nature of platforming levels. Usually, you're either ahead or behind your teammate, with few opportunities for direct cooperation. You can teleport to your teammate, which lets you assign only one of you to pass dangerous platforming challenges, but this is little more than turn-taking. The best cooperation gets in this game is budgeting resources between you, like deciding who should pick up health, and who should carry a power that only one of you needs.

Secondly, the game doesn't scale any aspect properly. It doesn't increase the number or stats of enemies. It scales boss health to 1.5x, but you do twice as much damage.

Thirdly, I've seen constant technical issues with online multiplayer such as latency, jumps and brief desyncs. These are very hard problems to solve in any real-time online game, but I think they're especially bad in a game so based on precise movement.

To be clear, multiplayer only ever adds value to a game, and I've certainly enjoyed it every time I've played it, but that's more because I enjoy 20XX itself than because I enjoy its multiplayer specifically. I would not recommend this to someone who primarily wants a multiplayer game.

Conclusion

20XX is an excellent and challenging fighter-platformer, sadly plagued by meta progression.