Nexus: The Jupiter Incident review (PC)

A smattering of role-playing elements are found in Nexus as well. As you progress through the campaign, you and your crews gain experience. And if you accomplish secondary objectives, you'll gain experience faster. Every now and then, you can upgrade one of your character's three main attributes: combat, engineering, and science. Combat makes your ship more effective in battle, whereas engineering gives you more resource points between battles. Meanwhile, science lets you both scan objects faster and detect enemies further.

Part of the fun of going through the story is watching your ships become more powerful. When you're in command of the Stiletto at the beginning of the game, you're at the controls of a ship you feel humans could probably construct in a hundred years or so. However, once the plot takes off, you find yourself taking command of the Angelwing, an alien vessel with the capabilities of a Star Trek series craft. The differences between the Stiletto and the Angelwing are like night and day, and they have effects on gameplay. At first, ship combat is almost stately and ponderous, almost like Master and Commander in space. But by the end of the game, the combat is almost frantic, as you try to keep up in huge battles against wickedly powerful foes armed with weapons you could only dream about earlier.

Mission design is where Nexus stumbles a bit. There's a wide variety of missions, ranging from stealth ones where you have to sneak up on a target, to knock-down, drag-out battle royals between a dozen ships. The stealth missions are where you'll more than likely encounter some frustration, as their general slow pace and stringent mission requirements will probably mandate that you play them over and over until you can figure them out. A particularly difficult level involves you having to navigate your ship through a gigantic asteroid cloud full of enemy sensors and patrols. You do have a cloaking device. However, it can only be used for a few minutes at a time before it must be recharged...and it won't help you if an enemy gets too close. This mission is difficult enough to make you pull your hair out. There are other missions where it's just simply a matter of playing and replaying them until you figure out what you're supposed to do. You can save the game during a mission, but this often causes the mission to crash, so it's not something we recommend.

The multiplayer mode is fairly simple but also quite enjoyable, assuming you can find opponents online. Nexus ships with the standard deathmatch and team deathmatch modes, along with the ability to create a custom skirmish game. Depending on the server settings, each player can control a small flotilla of ships, and the goal can be to get the most kills, get the most points, or be the last person standing. However, the real challenge is trying to find opponents, as there are only a handful of servers up at any given moment, because the game just doesn't have that large an audience.

In terms of visuals, Nexus is easily the best-looking space game to date, and it's arguably one of the better-looking games of the year thus far. It's a sumptuous graphical experience thanks to the advanced Black Sun graphics engine. The game takes advantage of the latest DirectX 9 graphical effects (you can force it to use DirectX 8.1 features if you have an older video card), and it looks good enough that you'll want to show it off to all your friends. The sound and voice acting are also well done, though they're not quite as attention-grabbing as the graphics. Still, they complement the action onscreen very nicely.

Nexus isn't perfect, but it's probably as close as space games are going to get for the forseeable future, simply because the genre isn't what it used to be. Still, this is a game that will whet the appetite of any sci-fi fan, as it depicts battles that were previously the domain of television and motion pictures.