Project XZ Steam Demo Review
Verdict: Play
A black-and-white action platformer where tower defence tags lie to you until you realise you are the main tower, and ar
The art style caught me immediately. Black and white silhouettes, striking contrast, enemies that are readable despite having no colour at all. I downloaded it on the art alone. Then I loaded in, saw the Tower Defense tag on Steam, saw two towers I could upgrade, and spent my first couple of runs dumping everything into them. I was getting destroyed and convinced I needed more damage. I did. Just not from the towers. Project XZ is a 2D Action Platformer with Tower Defense elements from Foxy H. My verdict is Play.
Project XZ is a play if you want a monochrome action platformer that borrows tower defence pressure without letting you hide behind turrets. I came for the art, lost runs by upgrading the wrong towers, and only clicked once armour piercing turned the swarm into a line problem. Find that skill early, invest in yourself, and read the fine print on fire rate. Try the demo before June 2026 and see whether normal difficulty feels fairer to you than it did to me on first contact.
Pros
- Black-and-white silhouette art keeps enemies readable even when the screen fills up
- Skill tree and energy spend actually encourage different builds once you stop feeding the side towers
- Armour piercing and consecutive-hit bonuses reward targeted play over spray-and-pray
- Wave pacing introduces new enemy types with enough breathing room to learn them first
- Death costs energy, so getting knocked out mid-wave still matters
Cons
- Early runs punish anyone who reads the Tower Defense tag literally and maxes static towers first
- Piston knockback can sabotage your own grenades if timing overlaps
- Fire-rate skill hides an accuracy penalty at pick time
- Side towers feel secondary compared to your own kit once the swarm gets going
- Normal difficulty and balance felt rough in the eight-wave demo slice
You are the main tower
Tower Defense is not wrong on the store page, but you are the main tower. You defend an extractor on the left of the map while enemies push from the right toward it, trying to break your towers and reach the objective. The strategy is not in maxing those side towers. It is in holding the lane while your kit scales.
The side towers have upgrade options. One is a piston that knocks enemies back on a timer. That sounds useful until you throw a grenade into a crowd and your own tower shoves everyone out of the blast radius right as it goes off. I did that more than once.
Project XZ plays like an Action Platformer in your movement and shooting, and like a Tower Defense game in how you hold a lane while the extractor survives. The first mistake is treating the static towers like the whole solution.
Skills, energy, and the armour piercing turn
Your weapon has upgrade paths. During waves you spend energy on active skills: grenade, knife attack, armour piercing, and others. You also carry a unique passive that levels as you progress. I kept taking the option that gave a heal and bonus damage on level up.
Another passive worth knowing is consecutive hit damage, which rewards targeted fire over spraying the screen. If you die you come back, but you lose some energy, so deaths still cost you mid-run.
One skill I would flag: a fire-rate boost that also cuts accuracy. The accuracy penalty is not mentioned when you pick it. I found that out the hard way every run until I stopped touching it. That skill fights almost everything else in the tree. Every run felt like I was one upgrade away from falling apart. Then I prioritised armour piercing early, stacked effective hit damage before worrying about rate of fire, and suddenly got further than before. Armour piercing was the one that changed everything for me. Bullets travel through enemies and hit the ones behind them, which is how you answer a swarm without pretending the side towers will carry you.
Assassins, waves, and readable chaos
New enemy types arrive wave by wave at a pace that gives you time to learn what they do before things escalate. My nemesis was the assassin type. They ignored my towers and came straight for me. At one point my double jump was on cooldown, I was stuck between a group of enemies, and I got slapped to death while shouting at my character to jump.
Even without colour or fancy graphics, it generally felt like a battle. The chaos is the good kind: busy but readable, and you always feel like you are in the middle of it rather than watching it happen.
Demo slice and balance
The demo I played is eight waves on one map. I did wonder at points whether it was more of a mini game than a full game, though that is probably demo format talking. Meta progression across runs is likely where the full game lives.
On normal I made it to wave four. I switched to easy and completed the slice. Some of that was a skill issue on my side. Some of it feels like balance still needs work before the June 2026 release. There were no Steam reviews yet at the time I played.
Game Info
- Developer
- Foxy H.
- Publisher
- Foxy H.
- Released
- 25 June 2026
- Full game
- Out now ($2.99)
- Platform
- PC
- Multiplayer
- No
- Controller
- Yes
- Playtime
- 2h
Watch the video review: YouTube
Tags: Tower Defense, Action, Platformer, Strategy, Indie, Shooter
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