Unquestionably the most amazing thing about Nexus is its graphics engine, which is capable of rendering some of the most epic space battles I’ve seen since Freespace 2. By using just about every common graphical trick in the book, Nexus puts forth an astonishingly beautiful graphical presentation, and this is thanks in no small part to the art team’s dedication to providing the utmost detail. Every ship in the game has maneuvering thrusters that flare visibly when the vessel is in motion, augmenting the feeling of a Newtonian-based environment. Ships also have little stencil tags that reflect their official name and identification number, and each and every weapon on a ship has a relevant moving animated pod or turret to fire from, ensuring that players don’t end up seeing beam weapons firing from nowhere. Even ship damage is reflected on a vessel’s hull, with blackened scars appearing over the hull plating whenever some torpedoes manage to get past a vessel’s shields, a feature I honestly wish more games would implement. Weapon effects have also been meticulously detailed, and I was particularly impressed with way a ship’s shields flared during each weapon impact. And did I mention how bad-ass the explosions are? Watching a ship’s reactor go critical leaves an almost blinding detonation of tremendous magnitude, and the effect of a guided missile going off (provided it actually reaches the target intact) is even grander. The game engine is very stable and maintained superb framerates on my XP2500+/Radeon 9600 Pro configuration, leaving me with a very fond impression of the game’s engine design.

Finally, on the topic of multiplayer, Nexus sports some strong network code that ensured smooth performance on any low-latency servers I played on – the few that were actually running, of course. Sadly, Nexus’ status as something of a niche title limits the game’s multiplayer potential, and I commonly had trouble finding a decent match to get into, if any servers were running at all. The game promotes a wide number of gameplay modes (such as the generic deathmatch / team deathmatch environments and more elaborate capture-and-hold or base siege scenarios) and a bunch of customization options to determine what ship types and equipment each team will have available, but sadly there are a few things lacking from this aspect of the game. Most significantly, I noticed that some of the cooler weapons from the single-player campaign (such as the “Siege Laser”, which requires several vessels to entire into formation and link their power grids to fire) are totally unavailable for use. The game also includes a single co-operative scenario, but this is sadly just a completely generic, non-customizable engagement against a single enemy fleet, which was quite a let-down after I got my hopes up from learning about the game’s co-op mode in the first place. This also means that the game basically has no decent “skirmish” mode available, so offline users can’t enjoy any kind of instant-action style of play unless they don’t mind being restricted to a limited environment. A multitude of third-party modifications are in development (some which have even been released) to rectify these concerns and expand on the game’s multiplayer and single-player functionality, but I still wish it had shipped with some more flexible features from the get-go.

Nexus: The Jupiter Incident is a game that has a chance to make quite the impact on the gaming industry. Games like Homeworld were quite revolutionary for the time and set the basis for how 3D RTS titles should be handled, but Nexus’ unique approach to fleet control and its sheer amount of detail make for an almost cinematic experience. Yes, the game can sometimes be overwhelmingly challenging and has a few problems, but that doesn’t make it any less of an amazing title. To all gamers who became dangerously aroused every time a capital ship beam cannon fired in Freespace 2: this game is meant for you. I really hope the developers plan to add content and expand on the game universe in the future, because this franchise definitely has potential.