In a day I thought would never come, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident has finally been released. Well, technically it’s been out since late last year, but the game has finally been green-lighted for release in the US, meaning overseas consumers have just lost their bragging rights. Originally destined to be “Imperium Galactica 3: Genesis”, the last publisher of this game, CDV, felt like drop-kicking the entire space game fanbase by canning the game just as it was nearing completion and quickly shoving it under the rug, leaving only an obscure tech demo that had sneaked onto the internet in it’s wake. Fortunately, Vivendi and HD Interactive decided to have mercy, as they salvaged the game from CDV’s dying clutches, resurrected the project, and have now completed what looks to be one of the most amazing space-based strategy titles since Homeworld. Sure, I’m more than a little angsty over the game’s bumpy development, but it’s finally here damnit, and despite a few problems, is ultimately well worth the wait.
Nexus takes place far in the future (as most space games typically do), with civil war and petty conflicts sparking up all over Earth’s solar system. The player’s role in this is that of one “Marcus Cromwell”, a soldier for the Spacetech Corporation and a decorated war hero. As captain of a Stiletto-class cruiser, Cromwell has been dispatched to the outer rim of planets to help deal with ongoing problems involving the “Kissaki Syndicate”. But as the investigation goes on, it eventually turns out that the Kissaki Syndicate has gotten itself involved with some unknown alien technology, and soon a new monster is discovered that threatens the state of the galaxy.
Nexus is a strategic game in the same general vein as Homeworld, in that players take control of fleets of spaceships and order them around through a third person camera, observing the action from afar and trying to out-wit enemy forces. But the elements of control and perspective manipulation are where the similarities end, as while Homeworld is a resource-driven RTS title, Nexus takes a purely tactical approach, focusing on specific engagements with (relatively) small numbers of capital ships and their fighter compliments. There is no mothership to fall back on to constantly reinforce your fleet with; whatever assets you begin the mission with are generally all that you’ll get until you accomplish your objectives. Despite that, the game still has some measure of resource management, as between missions players are granted the chance to customize the ships in their fleet with a variety of different “devices”, such as weapons, shields, generators, engines, and other neat little tools of destruction to help refine their fleet’s capabilities to the player’s preferred tactics.
Yes, “tactics”, a word commonly thrown around the RTS market, yet rarely backed up with actual substance. Most strategy games eventually devolve into the process of either throwing one or two types of unit at the enemy in overwhelming numbers or whoring out a single type of super-weapon, but does Nexus’ variety of ship sizes, weapons, and tactical approaches promote (and even demand) a more varied style of gameplay? So far, that definitely seems to be the case given all the different types of ships and weapons available that accommodate themselves to different methods of attack. With the exception of the early parts of the game (where the available hardware is incredibly primitive), there are typically three ways to go about damaging a vessel – draining its shields, destroying its devices, or demolishing its hull until the vessel is destroyed – and there are weapons set aside specifically for these purposes. Energy shells are designed exclusively to damage shields, lasers are only effective against devices, and torpedoes and gattling guns are used to damage hulls.
That said, the game offers variations on these weapons that makes selection a lot more important than simply choosing between energy shells / torpedoes or lasers – the difference between torpedoes and gattling guns, for example, is that torpedoes do massive damage, but have limited ammunition and have a very hard time hitting smaller, more maneuverable targets, while gattling guns work in an opposite manner, yet both are only capable of damaging a target after its shields have been breached (well, torpedoes actually do a small measure of splash damage which is exploitable in some sad form on occasion if a single ship is loaded down with a half-dozen launchers or so), and lasers are split up between heavy and light categories, the former which fires more slowly and is a bit less precise, but is better suited to damaging a target’s devices when its shields are still up. There are also a number of “super weapons” which have an extended reload time and a number of rather heavy downsides, but are capable of doing tremendous damage to a target. Energy Bombs, for example, launch a globe of energy (oddly enough) that detonates when it reaches a target, doing tremendous damage to the shields of all ships caught in the radius, but this obviously makes it very hazardous to use at close range. Energy torpedoes, in contrast, are very precise, but are exclusively meant to take down the shields of larger ships and have terrible accuracy against small targets. And finally, guided missile weapons deliver a huge payload to whatever target they hit, but are the only weapon in the game capable of being shot down by an enemy’s dedicated anti-aircraft defense, a downside that almost makes them not worth taking, sadly. But combine all of this with the ability to add limited fighter, bomber, or commando squadrons to any ship’s hangar and it’s easy to be impressed by how much tactical versatility Nexus offers.
But how do all of these weapons rank up in the field of battle? Do high-yield weapons that look good on paper actually get any use in the middle of a pitched fight, or is there one unbeatable ship configuration players can take to effectively make themselves invincible? Surprisingly, Nexus manages to maintain a level of balance between all the different weapons that ensures no single ship can be overwhelmingly powerful – the fast, nimble frigates and destroyers are quite fragile and can only carry a few weapons, while the gigantic battleships are effectively a magnet for abuse in a pitched battle and have only their significant shields and the interference of any friendly units to rely upon for defense. This is also reflected in the use of weapons, in that weapons like lasers and energy shells cannot do any significant hull damage, and due to the limited space available on a given ship for mounting weapons, players can quickly fall into the routine of outfitting their vessels for specific tasks. On top of that, each ship’s weapons generator is only capable of handling a limited demand of power output, so setting up a crazy anti-shield configuration on a ship while loading it with nothing but energy shell weapons will result in misery, as the ship’s firing rate will suffer greatly if it tries to shoot all of it’s weapons at once, almost rendering the existence of all of those weapons on a single vessel pointless due to the target’s shields recharging between salvoes. All this means that the player is challenged throughout the campaign to try and use tactics over raw muscle whenever possible, and apart from my aforementioned complaint over the guided nukes being rendered almost useless later on in the game, players of all skill levels should have no problem finding a use for each and every weapon available to him.
Of all the things to set Nexus above the competition in my opinion, however, the method used for fleet control is definitely it. Rather than forcing the player to depend almost exclusively on the AI with such an array of ship customization at his command, the developers have created an optional manual control system that allows direct hands-on manipulation of all of a ship’s systems, from raising its shields and adjusting engine output to accessing subsystems (like ECM) and even individually charging and targeting all of a ship’s weapon systems. The system is also quite intuitive – bringing up the manual control interface causes a panel to appear at the bottom of the screen, split up into five areas for all of a ship’s important aspects – shields, weapons, subsystems, engine selection, and engine control, and the entire interface is basically a point-and-click affair. Of most interest is weapons manipulation, where one can basically click on a weapon (or set of weapons in sequence for multiple firings), then click on a target to designate it, causing the weapon to charge and then fire once its capacitor is full and the target is in range. Alternatively, an interesting design feature allows for weapons to be “pre-charged” by simply double-clicking on the device in question, which can be incredibly useful for getting off that first barrage of heavy artillery in a long-range engagement. While this interface offers a superior level of control over a given ship and more than doubles its combat effectiveness, the sheer amount of work required to maintain manual control over more than a single ship makes it utterly impractical for large-scale engagements unless the pause function is abusively used. All of these customization and manual control options also increase the game’s complexity by another level, which some casual players might find a little daunting.
While Nexus’ level of complexity may be daunting for some, players will be relieved to know that the game’s AI is always on hand to offer some help for those scared away by the phrase “micro-management”. When not manually handling all aspects of a ship’s performance, players can set them to an automatic mode (adjusted through four behavioral settings) that allows the player’s ships to effectively take care of themselves. By using the command panel at the lower right of the screen, orders can be issued to a selected ship (or group of ships) to approach a target, run away from it, focus on using their shield, device, or hull-damaging weapons, hold position, scout a target, and do all kinds of other tasks that would otherwise require an insane amount of clicking action in the manual control panel to accomplish (especially in a dynamic battlefield with ships and projectiles maneuvering around in every direction). Using these modes (and one of the proper behavior settings, like “Aggressive”), ships will automatically defend themselves and maneuver as appropriate to get near the targets you designate and accomplish their assigned goal, which helped enormously later on in the game when the action was thick and my attention was constantly being demanded on several fronts (though I was still thankful for the pause function).
Sadly, for all the novelty the game’s self-sustaining AI seems to present at the early parts of the game, there are also numerous behavioral problems that I had an incredibly hard time working around. One of the most common complaints (there was even a mod released to try and fix this) is that the AI’s choices to use certain subsystems is quite illogical, and I found that they commonly turned off essential devices like ECM or ECCM when I sent them into combat, almost entirely nullifying the reason for my bothering to include those devices in the first place. Yes, I could pull up the manual control panel and switch the device back on, but this in turn disengaged the AI’s control over the ship and removed any benefits of such (like automatic weapon targeting). Even if I played with the various behavior modes, I still couldn’t get the AI to use its devices in a logical manner (even the “Defensive” behavior setting was unreliable) and was left with the frustrating task of either never relying ECM, or pausing the game every five seconds so I could use the manual control interface to update the controls on each and every ship in my fleet. There is also no way to queue up multiple orders for a ship to carry out (such as “go to this waypoint and engage X target” or “drain a target’s shields, THEN damage its hull, without waiting for my input”), which makes for an unnecessarily extra amount of work the player is forced to perform to stay on top of the combat situation, in my opinion. The AI’s automated functions certainly do a dependable job of keeping friendly ships moving and firing, but I soon found it very annoying that they weren’t really capable of doing anything more. Yes, I’m sure there are players out there who absolutely love all the micromanagement this game requires, but personally I would’ve had a much easier time if some extra functionality was offered to take the load off every now and then, rather than having the game basically encourage me to use the pause function and the manual control panel as much as possible to get the precision I needed.
Nexus’ campaign length spans about 25 missions, and has a very nice level of plot development and dialogue. In between missions, players are given command-level briefings to learn the current galactic situation and receive instructions, and can also access a history function to get further details on past events in the game universe through a sorted timeline of events, as well as access personal diary entries by Marcus Cromwell to read his thoughts as the campaign progresses. Individual missions are also rife with scripted dialogue between all of the interacting parties, although that’s effectively the limits of it – generic ship responses are limited to the usual “Affirmative” and “Yes Sir” lines, with a computer voice filling in background information on tactical events, like a ship being destroyed or a weapon running out of ammo. This is adequate, but I thought it would’ve been cooler if they had used a Homeworld-esque style of dynamic verbal interaction between the various ships to convey how the battle was going. As for the game’s difficulty, the campaign starts off fairly simple and then immediately begins ramping up, often placing me in highly demanding situations that required several attempts to bypass. Fortunately, the game has a fully functional mid-mission save feature that can be used at any time, and the difficulty can also be significantly toned down, so players who don’t mind sticking with it a little shouldn’t have any problem progressing through the game. A final complaint is that a lot of the missions almost seem a bit too scripted, and despite the variety of options the game’s plethora of devices and weapons offers, often requires the player to follow a strict and singular approach to stand a chance of winning the mission properly. This wasn’t terribly noticeable my first time through the campaign, but I felt it limited my choices somewhat.
