Nexus: The Jupiter Incident

Played only the singlelplayer. + Great story (as long as you read the diary entries). + Very well written. + Excellent narration. + Looks pretty good for its age (outside of the cinematics). + Ships are impressively detailed. + Unique, mostly straightforward control. - Some implementations make the life miserable though, and even the lowest difficulty it can get unreasonably difficult even when cheating by tweaking the ship and device effectiveness through the game files. - Everything takes forever (sure, that's space, but this is a simulation, so some lessening of that would be nice). - Some tutorials could be a little more detailed.

I wanted to like this game so much that I played it through to the end despite never having fun along the way. It tries to be tactical Homeworld with a set number of ships each mission. I would say this makes every level a "puzzle", except the interface and info is so awful that it's often guesswork aside from telling all your ships to focus fire one target at a time. Like Homeworld, it tries to be true 3D, but the interface is SO bad that it's pointless to try any movement commands other than "move closer to" and "move away from". A 3D game where the UI is so bad that it essentially turns it into 1D. That's...something. Story is a Homeworld Cataclysm fanfic mess. Ships will seem like they're barely taking damage until suddenly their shields fail and hull collapses. There are long puzzle missions that send you back to the start if you hit a fail state, sometimes "stealth" levels in a game with the previously mentioned awful UI movement. Tactical capital ship combat is SO my jam, so you can imagine how awful this was if I still give it 1 star.

Another hidden jewel, a game with beautiful graphics and relaxing atmospheric music. From the start this game didn't seem to be the type I'd enjoy playing, but soon the story got a lot more interesting and I was beginning to enjoy the combat. You will perform a lot of exploration in this game and venture into the unknown space. There are many strange things you will come across like abandoned space stations, wormholes, a rogue AI ship, alien civilizations and a super advanced type of alien artificial intelligence. You start by controlling a single ship, but later you will be able to use multiple ships in a battle. You will perform various missions like exploration, siege defence, space bug extermination, stealth infiltration, diplomatic missions, alien artifact capture etc. The game allows you to customize your ships with various types of weapons where some may be better for a specific purpose than than others. Overall this game has a lot of features that add up to an enjoyable experience. If you love space exploration, this game is for you.

It's difficult to describe Nexus to people who haven't played it, because there really aren't other games like it. Nexus: The Jupiter Incident revolves around a story with a central mystery, like so many great science fiction novels and movies do, and combines it with solid voice acting and gameplay that is both difficult and rewarding. You really do feel as though you're in command of a formidable fleet, and every decision matters -- if you lose a ship you'll know it's because of something you failed to anticipate or react to. On the flip side, when you come through a battle mostly unscathed, you can be proud of a job well done because, in a game that forces you to think, you succeeded on the strategic and tactical levels. Don't let the 2004 release date fool you. This is a game that would have labored the high-end machines and GPUs of the time, with advanced graphics meant for the next generation of video cards. That means the graphics are more than serviceable 12 years later, but don't take my word for it -- go watch some gameplay footage of the Nexus Battlestar Galactica mod and see for yourself what the graphics engine is capable of. (And aside from the BSG mod, which is awesome, make sure you grab the mod that allows the game to play in 16:9 widescreen. A recent patch may have added that feature to the game anyway, but I have the mod installed so I'm not sure. Just know that if Nexus isn't playing in widescreen, a mod exists to fix that problem.) Overall, this is a game that was ahead of its time, with real appeal to gamers and science fiction fans alike. If you like a good space opera story and BSG-style combat with ships broadsiding each other, and you like the idea of commanding a real fleet with capital ships, you can't go wrong with Nexus.

.. they never made Nexus II. I played this game in 2005. Was one of the best month of that year.