Pass the Controller | Latest news, reviews and reviews in video games
  • Home
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Community
  • About
    • Contact
    • Meet the Team
  • Home
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Community
  • About
    • Contact
    • Meet the Team
>

Nex Machina: Death Machine | PS4

21/6/2017

 
Picture

Nex Machina is a top-down twin-stick shooter from Resogun developer Housemarque. Its arcade-style design harkens back to retro classics like Robotron and Smash TV, which is no surprise considering the famed designer of those projects, Eugene Jarvis, was aboard the development team.

Picture

by Sam
​Sant

Picture

​@SlamShotSam

Picture
Developer: 
​
Housemarque
Publisher:
​
Housemarque​
Platforms: PS4, PC
Players: 1 ​- 2

Taking place in a distant future awash with bright neon colour, your time in this “cablepunk” setting is exclusively spent in the midst of pure action. You’ll find no narrative here, just an unapologetically old school shoot-'em-up breathed new life with a few mod cons.
 
It boasts painstakingly detailed and impressively dense 4K/HDR visuals on PS4 Pro and PC, a spectacular level of destruction that sees a deluge of debris shower the screen, uncompromising 60fps performance no matter the level of on-screen carnage, and an absolutely thumping synth soundtrack.
 
On the gameplay front, you’ll battle your way through a number of themed and segmented Worlds, saving vulnerable humans along the way. Clearing every enemy in a segment triggers a seamless transition to the next, each gradually building in complexity towards a closing boss encounter, for which you’d better have brought your bullet hell skills, because they can get intense.
 
Though Nex Machina demands speed and precision to the point we find ourselves playing perched on the edge of our seats, leaning into the screen with a laser-focused gaze, the frenetic action is actually very accessible at a base level. With only four button inputs and a range of difficulty levels, it’s an easy game to pick up and play.

In typical Housemarque fashion, however, there’s much more beneath the surface for those that wish to delve a little deeper. Notching up the difficulty boosts movement speeds, introduces more enemies to kill and humans to save, lowers your pool of lives and continues, and even introduces a punishing sixth World.
Nex Machina demands speed and precision to the point we find ourselves playing perched on the edge of our seats, leaning into the screen with a laser-focused gaze.
That’s a lot to tackle, especially with no tutorials or hints of any kind, but by bravely leaving you to uncover its many nuances through observation and trial and error, Nex Machina ensures its self-learnt intricacies are cemented in your mind. The gameplay communicates information fluently, steadily introducing an evolving range of baddies to illustrate what attacks you can and can’t dash through, what you do and don’t have to kill to progress, or who’s the biggest overall threat and resulting primary target of a given wave. Knowing how to correctly manage enemy types to stop them controlling portions of a stage is integral to your survival, while identifying those that target helpless AI humans and dealing with them quickly will work wonders for both your score and your conscience.
That said, choosing whether or not to save humans is a constant risk vs. reward minefield; you’ll need to put yourself in harm’s way to grab them and gain the associated points to climb the online leaderboards, but, if you die in doing so, you’ll end up worse off than if you'd left them to their doom and saved your own skin.

​Any single blow is fatal in Nex Machina, and death carries some significant repercussions. Not only do you lose a life and a chunk of the score multiplier you’ve worked to build - along with your all-important, trance-like flow - but you’ll also drop one of the upgrades (increased range, bullet spread, etc.) or secondary weapons (these range from a sword to a rocket launcher, with use limited by a brief cooldown period) you've collected. This often leads to multiple consecutive deaths as you foolheartedly rush to pick it back up from the spot you died, or just struggle on in its absence if it was something you were relying on. All too often we’ve been on a perfect run only to lose multiple lives and upgrades successively to the mechanic, leaving us caught in a rut and faced with besting that same difficult section now at a marked disadvantage.
 
You can keep retrying while you maintain a stock of continues, but when they run dry it's a legitimate game over and you have to start back at square one. Whilst that’s somewhat jarring by today’s standards - especially when you consider the fact you also can’t save, so you’re in it for the long haul when playing Arcade mode, the game's main attraction - forcing you to replay sections helps to develop your skills, which will see you glean more from the game in the long run. It might seem irritating if you don’t remember a time when this was the industry standard, but the extra practice really does make perfect.
 
You’ll never actually be at too significant a loss, mind, as the game only takes around two hours to play from start to finish. Despite what you might be thinking, that isn’t any real cause for concern when it comes to Nex Machina’s value proposition, as it’s massively replayable. Memorising enemy spawn patterns and the location of secrets unearthed by destroying environments is endlessly rewarding, allowing you to implement that knowledge into future runs to achieve lofty new high scores.
Arcade and Single World modes (the latter allowing you to practice Worlds out of sequence) can be played in co-op if you have a nostalgia-hungry pal to hand, which we mean literally, as it’s fittingly (though still disappointingly) local only. The suite of modes is rounded out by Arena, which tasks you with meeting gold, silver and bronze score thresholds whilst wrestling with modifiers like limited timeframes and increased tempo. They take place in the same familiar Worlds, but are just about different enough to provide an engaging break from the main thrust now and then, which is perhaps how they’re best consumed, with only eleven challenges on offer.

Housemarque proved themselves capable of keeping arcade-style games relevant in the modern marketplace with the release of Resogun, but in partnering with Eugene Jarvis on Nex Machina they’ve surpassed themselves. Filled to the brim with pulse-pounding, nail-biting and addictive action on a gorgeously impressive scale, never skipping a beat, constantly complemented by the standout, retro-infused soundtrack, the game is a modern shoot-’em-up masterpiece that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the 80s classics that inspired it.
 
Pros
 
  • Tight, challenging and moreish gameplay
  • Stunning visuals
  • Flawless technical performance
  • Range of modes to keep you invested
  • Hugely replayable and rewarding to do so
 
Cons
 
  • Easy to get stuck in a rut when you die and lose your upgrades
  • Local only co-op will rule it out for some
 
9/10
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.



    READ MORE

    News
    Features
    Videos

    Comment Here

    Categories

    All
    Action Adventure
    Adventure
    Air Combat
    Arcade
    Family
    Fantasy
    Fighter
    Hardware
    Horror
    Indie
    Management Sim
    Multiplayer
    Narrative
    Open World
    Party
    Platformer
    Puzzler
    Racing
    Roguelike
    Roguelite
    Role Playing
    RPG
    Shmup
    Shooter
    Sim
    SoulsLike
    Sports
    Stealth
    Strategy
    Survival
    Virtual Reality


    Archives

    February 2025
    December 2023
    November 2023
    September 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    July 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015


    RSS Feed

Pass the Controller

News
Reviews
Features
​
Videos
Community
About

What is PTC

About Us
​Meet the Team
​
Contact Us
Find our reviews on:
  • OpenCritic
  • vrgamecritic
© COPYRIGHT 2014-2022 PTC / JMP.
​ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.