Chaos Hour

Nexuiz Review

Nexuiz is A Game That Is Like So Many Others, Like Quake In Gameplay And Halo In Style But Has Nothing Of Its Own To Offer.

Nexuiz, which is pronounced Nexus in case you’re wondering, is an old school first person shooter which is very similar to the original Quake games. The game is online only, apart from a bot mode where you can set up custom games against A.I. This comes in handy if you think you need practice or to familiarise yourself with the different maps. The back story basically just gives you a reason why there are two teams fighting each other. Two alien races named the Kavussari (the red team) and the Forsellians (the blue team) have been at war for centuries and after finally reaching a peace agreement they decide to hold the Nexuiz tournament in which they are tasked to kill each other in arena combat to distil any bad blood between the two races and prevent another war. So, yeah it’s all pretty silly but it’s not important since this an online only first person shooter.

Moving on to game play, players can either set up their own private matches between friends or use the quick match feature to play online. There are only two game modes, team death match and capture the flag and since you can only press quick match to play online against other people you can’t select which mode you prefer and are only given the option to search for a type of map, which can get pretty annoying. I had multiple problems even trying to get into a game I either had a message saying it failed to connect or I would have a message saying that the servers are currently unavailable and then I wouldn’t even be able to search for games. Anyway after a while it connected, you may have to exit to the dashboard and start the game again to try searching, and I was thrown in to a team death match. The first thing I noticed was that the graphics were quite pretty for an arcade game and since the game is powered by CryEngine 3 this isn’t surprising. There’s also a nice bit of variety with the maps with levels varying from Halo style purple buildings where you can see a futuristic city out the windows, to tropical ruins teeming with plant life.

When you’re moving around trying to shoot people the game is noticeably frantic and fast paced, very much in the style of Quake, you even pick up floating armour shards and full armour to boost your own. Players will often find themselves frantically running around each other in circles trying to get a lucky shot on one another. The fast movement speed makes slow firing weapons like the rocket launcher and sniper rifle pretty useless as your enemy tap dances around your pathetically slow rockets before smashing your face in with a melee attack while your reloading. I would have liked to have had a choice in characters to play as or create loadouts, but you’re just stuck as the blue or red people which all look the same and are pretty generic, armoured space warrior type stuff that you’ve seen a million times before.

Nexuiz is a game that is like so many others, like Quake in gameplay and Halo in style but has nothing of its own to offer. In fact the only mildly interesting thing Nexuiz brings to the table is the introduction of random mutators within matches that can have positive and negative effects on the game. For example when activated mutators can provide yourself, your team or everyone with effects such as: infinite ammo, health regen, low gravity, melee only and invulnerability. There are also the negative/funny effects such as: uber nuke which counts down and kills everyone on the map, big heads, mute and bumper cars, which causes players to bounce off each other with great force. I remember one caused me to constantly bounce around, making me plummet to my death and another that would be changing my weapons randomly every ten seconds.

These mutators range from being quite interesting to extremely annoying and the bad news is that you can’t turn them off when searching for games in quick match, so if you’re not fussed on these mutators and you just want play an old school shooter then you just have to put up with it. The soundtrack is very electro trancey type stuff in an attempt to sound sci-fi and is mostly terrible. You will frequently hear the same tracks, which often consist of the same ten second drum beat sped up and looped for five minutes, it’s a wonder I didn’t tear out my own ear drums or go in to a brain dead trance from the repetition.

To conclude Nexuiz isn’t really worth your time, if you’ve played Quake you’ve already played this and it was done allot better back then. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table, has a terrible soundtrack, very few game modes and connection issues. I find it hard to recommend this game on any level. I guess if you’re looking for a poor man’s Quake with drums then this is the game for you, still at least it looks nice and shiny.