Game Reviews

Space. There is, to put it mildly, rather a lot of it. It's vast, dark and cold beyond comprehension, and filled only with emptiness. And lens flare, naturally.

Space is, quite frankly, a bit of a tough sell as real estate goes, but it's certainly very good for certain things - such as playing host to epic battles between hulking metallic capital ships, darting fighters and sleek alien starfaring vessels, all tearing strips off each other with exotic combinations of beam weapons, mass drivers and lethal torpedoes.

It's a good thing, then, that Mithis decided to add the space battling element to Nexus - The Jupiter Incident, since a game focused on looking at nicely rendered asteroids, planets and, er, hard vacuum, wouldn't be very entertaining. Instead, they've delivered a game which is a science fiction fan's wet dream - filled with the aforementioned epic battles, hulking capital ships and what have you, and presented with a sense of dramatic scale that leaves other space strategy games in the moondust.Nexus is, in short, a space strategy simulation. I can see the comparisons with Homeworld forming in your minds already, though, and you need to nip those in the bud. Where Homeworld was effectively a real-time strategy game with the added twist of a third dimension, Nexus is all about commanding a battleship or a small fleet through engagements with the enemy and other such missions. Rather than just clicking on a point on the map and telling a unit to head over there and mine some ore or shoot some bad guys, you're effectively placed in the captain's chair, and must command the ship(s) and crew on a much more up close and personal level.