Nexus: The Jupiter Incident

I found the game quite pleasant and fun to play. The graphics still hold out well today and the game is a pleasure to look at. Gameplay is solid squad-tactics rts, a kind of opposite of Homeworld where one commands hundreds of units. You can customise your ships before a mission and the limited amount of ships plus them being named and invested in makes them care about you. Story and music are, as far as i was able to see pretty decent as they develop into a space opera. However, what made me uninstall the game out of rage and principle was the design of mission 13 - Sneaking. Unless one times their movement down to a millimeter you will fail as the designers had a very clear intention on how one was supposed to finish it. I found it such an antithesis to an otherwise fairly open-ended mission format that i uninstalled the game after restarting the mission a dozen or so times. If you can get past this then the game is worth trying out.

It is a great game, with stunning visuals. Your fleet managment isn't very intuitive at beginning (you just can't move wherever you want - only to marked waypoints), but after few hours of gameplay game is great. The storyline is ok, but the game truly shines at combat mechanics and visial side of space battles.

Nexus is one of the best games I played of all time, and one of the most frustrating. It is also my most beloved. It is unique. It is extraordinarily difficult. Both the gripping story and the technological advancements in the game are tied together. Don't be deceived by the starting missions. I recommend playing through the game several times on easy before advancing to harder difficulty. Any given mission can be beaten in a dozen different ways, and in a lot of cases depending on player actions the mission will adapt to your choices. Nexus is a game of trial-and-error. This is why I recommend beating Nexus first on Easy difficulty. Many lament the awkward "stealth missions" in the game which are actually my favorite. And this is the game's shining point, truly. You really feel like you are Captain of your own starship, in a ruthless and realistic fight that goes beyond firing a few photo torpedoes. The game itself even has a unique genre unheard of in the industry, calling itself a "Tactical Fleet Simulator." No one else has attempted it since, and oft-compared games like Homeworld still are not even close to the feeling or experience.' Probably my biggest complaint about the game is the control system. The game does not make this clear enough and could stand for an advanced tutorial of some sort that would instruct the player on tactics that more clever players will have to discover for themselves. If you can't get used to this system, you will quickly quit the game. Master and manipulate this system, and you can achieve extraordinary feats. Graphically the game is outstanding, and the newer Steam version of the game features a widescreen patch that was sorely-needed. I love and hate Nexus, and like everyone else who loves this game and its mind-bending ending, I beg for a sequel. Please be prepared for an uphill battle, and don't expect to master the game on first playthrough. You will enjoy this extremely underrated game. It's a masterpiece.

Finally this overlooked game arrives here. Probably THE definitive space game out there, Nexus is a well-written space combat simulator game that puts you and your ship(s) into tactically demanding scenarios and lets you loose. Wonderful visuals, brilliant atmosphere, tense gameplay and a gripping story make the game's few shortcomings, - a less than complete tutorial - a questionable automation system forcing you to do specfic things manually -three problematic stealth missions just being a small dent in a never before seen experience. This is a one-of-a-kind game, a game ventured somewhere were far too few games go. We need more of that. But since it is not going to happen, you are better of buying this.

This game got a lot of press at the time of its release, and accumulated quite a number of fans, despite some annoying and blatant issues. Undoubtedly, some people will enjoy it. No, I don't know anyone who still plays this, or even anyone who played it more than a couple of times. You see, even by 2004 standards, the interface and graphics arrangements of Nexus are primitive. There is no wide screen setting, despite a clear indication that widescreen would be prominent in the future, and the solid fact that multiple screens were already possible (you can try going around the game limitations, but you will end up not entirely pleased with the results). There is no GUI for changing key bindings, and the controls and navigation are anything but intuitive. The tutorials, by which one might eventually learn the controls, are completely inadequate. They are inferior even next to an old game like FreeSpace. At this point, I'm not amused, and the best thing I can say about the game is that I paid virtually nothing for it. This is fortunate, considering how unlikely it is that I will ever actually play it again.