GAME REVIEW: Nex Machina (2017)
I’ve been playing this game on and off for years, so I can’t believe I’ve never written it up before. Made by Housemarque, Nex Machina is like a 3D spiritual successor to their 2D 2013 release, Resogun. Updated in 2017 to be even more of a bullet hell than its predecessor, the game really won us over for being multiplayer, having great music, and generally just being really fun.
Okay, first things first: this game has the friggin’ best soundtrack. There are literally songs that I was getting confused between Ari Pulkkinen and Perturbator when I first started listening to them both, because the style is very similar—dark synthwave at its finest! I listen to this soundtrack on the regular for a variety of reasons: I want to listen to synthwave, I want to do body maintenance, I want a cyberpunk atmosphere for writing or TTRPGs… this soundtrack is great for the game experience itself, but there’s a lot of other situations wherein it works as well, because there’s a wonderful flow and a rhythm to the sound. Plus, the Game Music Collective happened to cover the theme song, “Let Me Save You,” with friggin’ Helena Haaparanta on vocals, so they elevated the hell out of that. Truly, a 10/10 soundtrack, can recommend!
The game itself is good proof that you don’t need to be complicated to be great and have a ton of replay value. Here, you play as a dude with a blaster who is trying to eliminate monsters (aliens, I guess?), with optional things to do like destroying special enemies and towers and saving humans, but those aren’t necessary for completion. Controls are simple, with the left joystick for movement, the right for shooting, and the triggers for specials and dashing. That’s it! The rest is just learning the levels and getting familiar with the enemies and their movements. There’s certainly a learning curve to the game but the different difficulty modes certainly help with it and I don’t ultimately have any complaints about the mechanics or how they work—simple and effective!
In its spirit, this is a frustrating game because it is a bullet hell at its core. I feel like this is a game that works better for people with a rhythm in them… maybe just because I love the soundtrack so much, but I feel as though I can get into the flow of the music and use it to help me go through the levels and find the zone more easily than in a game without such a great soundtrack. It also has the added bonus that listening to the soundtrack often makes me want to play the game again, which is the sign of a good soundtrack.
As I mentioned though, perhaps the most fun to be had in this game is by playing multiplayer. My partner and I are endlessly searching for fun couch co-op games to play together and seldomly find any with as much replay value as Nex Machina has given us. I’ve never even completed the game, not even in multiplayer, yet I still love to try. This is because, in order to reach Nex Machina itself, you have to play the game on Veteran difficulty, which only has 10 lives, and we tend to burn out long before we get to the Supreme AI in the preceding level. So despite having played the game for 5+ years now, there’s still something for us to achieve in it, if we’re so inclined, which is another big selling point for me!
It’s perhaps our most-played and most-returned-to game that we play together. It’s one of those games that we don’t delete from the PS4 because we’re always going to come back to it and it’s also been a helpful learning tool for us. The last time we played, which was in November, we agreed to start narrating what we’re doing a bit, so that we can find a better rhythm together. What we found out was that we were often doing the same thing and not optimizing our two-player spread. When we started explaining why we were moving somewhere, we were able to get in sync more easily and make decisions like, “you take out the towers, I’ll cover you” or other things. It was a really useful tool in helping us improve our communication together, which we were able to take out-of-game as well!
Overall, I heavily recommend this game to people who enjoy challenging bullet hells and multiplayer gaming with great soundtracks! I really don’t have a lot of complaints about this game at all, so do check it out!
