Everything is simple, everything is perfect
The story of Nex Machina, that of a future dystopian cyberpunk in the ’80s style, where the machines have now kneeling the few human survivors, is just a thin veil covering the two, at most three hours of gameplay needed to complete the title.
It is not even the pretext to fire and break the hordes of robots and the infinite devilies that make up the schemas, because like in all the games where we spent hundreds of chips there is not the slightest trace of an introductory movie or a sketch because the Earth as we knew it was a pale memory.
You do not feel the need: simply, you press start and you start playing, in a mental trip based on bullet hells, slips and explosions,Nex Machina differs from his predecessors, he has no narrative flair like Dead Nation , nor relies on exploration as Alienation , but develops along a hundred abundant schemes, grouped into five worlds, each of which culminates in the classic boss fight, against increasingly more warlike anthropomorphic robots as their energy bar falls. Schemes, Worlds and Boss Fight: If it was not clear yet, Nex Machina is a real tribute to the past of video games , when we did not have to play video games about the inner development of characters or photorealism for fun.
The purpose of Nex Machina Absolute purity: Eliminate all the enemies in the scheme, save some survivors before some robots eliminate it and above all get the highest score to climb the rankings.
The levels are also shadowed by hidden secrets, additional human beings to save, radiophiles to break down, in short, pretexts not to abandon the pad after completing the first run. But the truth is less romantic: gambling experience runs out in a few hours, unless you have a flesh and bone friend to share joys, sorrows, and many deaths because Housemarque’s work supports co- op in local with both shared screen.
Too bad for the lack of multiplayer online, a potential boost for grinding hours and hours of gaming together with unknown twin-stick shooters around the world. In this sense, even the Arena mode does not add a lot, with a rewrite of the same schemes, on which some variants on enemies, sometimes faster, more resistant and dangerous, are grafted.
The three levels of difficulty – plus the unlockable quarter – make less stringentNex Machina , wrapping the player of a spiral of competition even against himself, to see if he is capable of surviving the famed hordes made from bunches of bolts and gears using only ten credits, as suggested in Expert difficulty.
No break
Nex Machina is a tough, but unheard of game, though the difficulty is not always well calibrated, not so much because of unjustified peaks, but for a complexity that sometimes seems to hiccup as it progresses into the worlds: you can safely remain locked for a few minutes in a room of the second stage, while with ease all the enemies that flock to the next world are sent to the air.
The same happens for boss fight, the peak of adrenaline and frenzy, where your fingers fire on the crash padand where the brain metabolizes different, increasingly dangerous and lethal patterns: Personally, I found this kind of metal Donkey Kong more complex than the robot locksmith and its circular saws ending in the next section.
In all this chaos, it would be easy to confuse Nex Machina for a game that is just over the lines and exaggerated tones but with no solid foundation: the reality is that the Housemarque guys have been doing a sophisticated care at the design level, claustrophobic, bounded by laser beams fired by fixed or moving turrets.
In these environments is the same player who has to create his spaces in a clever positioning game, where to stay in the same area for more than a few tenths of a second is equivalent to a certain death.
