
Imagine having a drunken fistfight with a fireworks display in a sandstorm — but in all the good ways — and that’ll give you a passable idea of how Nex Machina plays.
The much-anticipated collaboration between Finnish arcade shooter stars Housemarque and industry legend Eugene Jarvis (Robotron: 2084, Defender, Smash TV), Nex Machina puts you in the shoes of a nameless warrior tasked with saving valuable scientists in the aftermath of a robot uprising. While the spectacular voxel-based engine, carried over from Housemarque’s PlayStation 4 launch title Resogun, is certainly a head-turner, it’s the way that Jarvis’s influence is felt at the game’s core that is its real x-factor. With its fast, robot shootin’ and human savin’ gameplay, Nex Machina is essentially a modern Robotron, one that lives up to that game’s storied legacy with aplomb.

The game’s old-school philosophy is best exemplified by its strategic layer. It’s a game about space, and how its diverse cast of characters aim to rob it from you. Waves of grunts funnel you away from the precious humans, while turrets lay down suppressive fire, trying to restrict your movement, and make it easier for the horde to corner and overwhelm you (PRO TIP: Turrets are bastards. Shoot them first).
Nex Machina’s controls are instantly familiar, keeping within the twin-stick wheelhouse. The left trigger gives you a dash, which is essential for staying alive around the more bullet hell-inspired enemies (of which there are a lot) while the right activates your special weapon, which can be found via cycling pick-ups when certain crates are destroyed.
The special weapons tend to be designed around different playstyles. The missile launcher is good for straight shooting, but advanced players may prefer the kamikaze options offered by the sword, or a more deliberate, sniper-esque style catered to by the laser and (painfully slow) longshot. The arguably most useful weapon is the detonator, an explosive ball that can be launched remotely and provides offensive punch while allowing you to stay mobile.
As you’d expect from a game taking its cues from the golden age of arcades, none of this is easy. So challenging is Nex Machina, in fact, that the onscreen instructions actually recommend playing through the Arcade mode on the easiest setting first. This is partly in order to unlock worlds for the other modes, but also just so you can acclimatise yourself to the game’s systems before jumping into the meat-grinder.
Enemy patterns run to a specific order, and as with all the great coin-op shooters each level becomes a kind of high-octane puzzle: you identify the high-priority targets, learn the patterns, and figure out the best strategy for clearing the room in the most efficient manner. The reward is that occasional golden run, where you get everything… just… right, and manage to push yourself that little bit further, your high score just that little bit further up. A great shooter, no matter how hard it is on you, respects your efforts and is always teaching you, even when it’s incessantly kicking your arse into jelly.
Nex Machina encourages the player to display a similar lack of timidity, to manage the crowd, stay on the offensive and keep carving out space to avoid getting backed into a corner. It doesn’t reward aggressive play, but assertive play — a big difference, one which, when mastered, leads to heart-thumping moments of exhilaration as you repeatedly cheat death in a flurry of laser-fried voxel viscera.

You earn coins that are used to unlock modes with various modifiers, from sped-up game play to timed score-attack modes. While not all of these modes are entirely successful — the fast modes, for example, make small bullets and enemies much harder to see in the now twice as intense particle frenzy, in a way that feels cheap — they do help replayability, but ultimately Nex Machina isn’t a game for people who are too fundamentalist about modern notions of content. This is a game possessed of a kind of laser-keen focus you don’t see much nowadays, and these are levels made to be played over and over, until every last enemy wave, hidden goodie, nook and cranny are etched into the memory for optimal score opportunity.
The game’s only real misstep is having the dash on the trigger. On my new Xbox One controller, the trigger’s millisecond’s travel time doesn’t always provide the responsiveness you need in the heat of the moment. It’s not a dealbreaker by any means, but noticeable in a game comprised almost entirely of hot moments and which led to a few frustrating deaths.

Our verdict:
Hosemarque’s finest game so far, Nex Machina is a retro game fan’s wet dream, all the sweeter coming hot on the heels of Jeff Minter’s superb, Trent Reznor endorsed Polybius. There’s something genuinely heartwarming about the fact that two of the best games of the year so far see two legendary games designers from the early days of the medium, bring their styles into the modern age so triumphantly.
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