LogFAQs > #966497481

Nex Machina (PC)

Very generously gifted to me by our very own KCF, so thank you again for that! Not much to say about this one - it's a wild, fast-paced bullet hell twin-stick shooter, and it's awesome. Short and sweet. I'm not often an arcade-y, high-score-chasing kind of gamer but this is one that I'm gonna keep installed to do runs of every once in a while when I have just a bit of time to game. This one had been on my radar for a while and it didn't disappoint.

TROUBLESHOOTER: Abandoned Children (PC)

Speaking of games that have been on my radar for a while... I have a ton to say about this game but I'll try to keep it relatively short.

This is an XCOM-style SRPG made by a small team of Korean developers, and it's an all-timer of a hidden gem. SRPGs outside of Fire Emblem normally don't land with me, but reviews were super positive and really spoke to me, and that dev team is still putting a ton of work into it two years following the release, so I figured it very much deserved a shot.

And it paid off. There's an insane amount of content here for a game that regularly goes on sale for $15. 70 hours to get through the six chapters that make up the main story plus a few scattered side missions from time to time, and there's a whole additional chapter that's been released as free DLC that I haven't even touched yet, along with tons of other optional missions for players that just can't get enough. And to go along with that insane amount of content is an insane amount of depth. Character customization is ridiculously expansive but never complicated, and you can spend as much or as little time tweaking your units as you want. There's a loot system, equipment crafting, monster taming, character bonding, and probably one or two other mechanics that I'm even forgetting. Maps are tightly designed and can even be huge sometimes with ~100 enemies to take down, but there was only one occasion I can think of where a mission felt like it actually dragged.

The story is pretty great too, only held back by a pretty rough translation that's mostly headed by the community. That's honestly the game's only flaw in my mind - it's never so terrible that you can't tell what's going on, but a good bit of dialogue will come off as very awkward to native English speakers and I'm sure there's quite a bit of nuance lost. Which is a bummer, because there's a ton going on - lots of characters with different alliances to keep track of and so forth. There's of gang warfare, religious cultism, shadowy government programs, deft political maneuvering, and more, all held together by a super likable main cast with a couple of real standout characters. AND this is only the first game in what, as I understand it, is planned to be a pretty sprawling series.

Hell, even the soundtrack is great! I really can't say enough good things about this game; I think it could really threaten to be the favorite game of all time for a certain type of gamer. Definitely wish it was more well-known, because it deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as the titans of the genre. If you're a fan of SRPGs at all, please do at least check out the Steam store page to see if it grabs you.