Nexus: The Jupiter Incident

I played this game in standard and experienced difficulty, and the shortcomings were not so obvious on the standard playthrough, but became very anoying on higher difficulty settings. The graphics and the whole setting is (STILL!) BEAUTIFUL. Voice acting is fine, sounds are good too. The story is nice, but that's not the main point of the game. It is fleet battle. This game got so MANY THINGS RIGHT in fleet battle tactics, I loved it on the standard playthrough, with all the meaningful ship control options and ship outfitting decisions. The bad things start to show on higher difficulty levels where you need to squeeze out all the performance you can get from your ships. It begins with some anoying BUGS, (fort shield not deploying, ships get "stuck" and refuses to shoot, or same happens to the enemy, allied ships refuse to shoot etc) It continues with the anoying AI of your ships. Since its tactical fleet sim, the individual ships sould be responding well to your commands. For instance if you set them on aggressive, they just shoot at the closest enemy, ignoring your specific command to attack another enemy. Of course you can set the behaviour fo the ship to focused manual, but then you need to set EVERYTHING (speed, subsystems, energy, weapons) manually, which is not necessary, and needs constant micromanagement adjustment during battle, otherwise you run out of energy etc. So there is NO MIDDLE GROUND between extreme micro or senselessly shooting what's closest. The other problem is the cluttered UI which exacerbates the constant need for micromanagement on higher difficulty. There are differen energy systems on the ships, but some are linked, and that's no aparent at all. The diffiult battles you face would need better control over your fleet but with these flaws that can be achieved through extreme micro only. A shame, since this game got so much RIGHT! With a bit more polishing it could have been the greatest. It is still good, but extremely frustrating.

Fun game but i found myself getting frustrated due to some of the bugs and baffling design mentioned such as only being able to use navigation points in space. Soemtimes... ok alot of the time i use a walkthrough to find out i have been failed due to a bug or non event . However when it does work it is great and despite the frustrations i keep coming back wnatign to finish it and see. You can save during missions (just don't alt tab or you cannot save again untill you load the game). The story so far isn't amazing but its better than sc2 in terms of sci fi plots. if you like trial and error strategy with cool fights check this out its worth a shot.

I am not much for difficult games, I guess I just like to blow stuff up. When I played this game when it was new, I failed many of the late game missions but I kept coming back, reading a walkthrough and trying again. I, like many others, have bought, played, and gotten tired of many, many games before getting to the end; this game is not one of those. If you like space-based games then you owe it to yourself to pick this one up. There are still plenty of resources available to help you if you get stuck, and it appears to have an active mod community.

The controls are extremely clumsy especially when you need to use the manual, control. Home world had already been released at this point with much better control scheme that felt intuitive. This game is the exact opposite. The interface is clunky and having to engage manual navigation of your ship is punishing. Getting your ships to fire the right weapons at the right time is a nightmare, espeically using the artillery attacks. Overall the game is a painful grind.

I really enjoy it and return to it from time to time, its has fun battle mechanics and i would love to have a game like this with more strategy elements, the story is a little short and nothing revolutionary but does its job.