Nex Machina

In 1982, Eugene Jarvis’s Robotron: 2084 gave players two joysticks, a screen full of killer machines and a family of humans to save. Thirty-five years later, Jarvis worked with Housemarque, the Finnish studio behind Resogun, to make that game again with modern tools. Nex Machina is the result, and it doesn’t hide its roots.

The setup is thin, and that’s intentional. In a “cablepunk” future, people have come to depend so heavily on technology that the machines became self-aware and turned on them. You play a lone fighter moving through more than 100 short levels across six worlds. You destroy robots that burst into showers of voxels, and you try to reach the last surviving humans before the machines get to them. The story is there to set up the action and adds little else.

Nex Machina is aimed squarely at arcade players. It doesn’t have a skill tree, loot, a crafting system or a battle pass. What it does have is a multiplier and combo system that rewards clean, aggressive play, plus community and friend leaderboards that turn every run into a competition. Hidden paths, secret humans and collectibles reward players who replay levels and learn their layouts.

Critics rated it well. It holds a Metacritic 84 on PC. The game didn’t sell well, though. Housemarque later announced it would stop making arcade games and moved toward the larger productions it’s now known for. That context matters here. Nex Machina is the last arcade game from the studio best equipped to make one, and it’s built like a studio putting everything it knew into a single release.

• Dash-based movement: A short dash lets you pass through enemy fire. It’s the most important tool in the game, used for both defense and positioning.
• Human rescue: Survivors are scattered through each level, and the machines are heading for them. Saving them feeds your score and creates a constant conflict between staying safe and taking risks.
• Secondary weapons: Lasers, rockets and a sword add to your main gun. Each one changes how you approach a crowded room.
• Deep scoring system: Multipliers, combos and a broader metagame reward consistency and planning, not just survival.
• Leaderboards: Community and friend rankings give you a reason to replay levels you’ve already beaten.
• Arena mode: Extra challenge stages for players who’ve mastered the campaign.
• Local co-op: Two players can play together on the same screen.
• Adjustable difficulty: Several difficulty settings make the game more approachable, although its hardest settings are harsh.
• Custom engine: Housemarque rebuilt its engine around signed-distance-field ray tracing and morphing to handle the dense voxel effects.

The Core Loop: Movement Matters Most

Most twin-stick shooters are about aiming. Nex Machina is mostly about movement. The left stick moves you, the right stick fires, and the dash is what keeps you alive. Early on, it works as an escape tool, the same way a panic button works in other games. The design then teaches you to dash into enemy fire, through a line of projectiles, and come out behind the enemy that fired them.

That change is the game’s best design decision. It turns defense into offense and rewards players for committing to a move. The controls are built for speed and consistency, and the design makes deaths legible: when you die, you can almost always see what you did wrong, and a fair death is what makes players try again.

The levels are short, and that helps. Each one is a single arena-sized challenge you can finish in a few minutes or less. Mistakes cost you little time, so trying again feels easy. The campaign moves quickly from one level to the next without padding.

Rescuing Humans Creates Real Choices

The rescue system gives the game its depth. Survivors aren’t only collectibles. They’re under threat, and the machines are going after them. That forces choices constantly. Do you clear the enemies near you, or dash across the screen to save a human before a robot reaches them? The safe option costs points, and the risky one could cost a life.

Robotron worked the same way, and Jarvis’s influence shows. The difference is that Nex Machina adds secret humans and hidden paths, which reward players who learn the level layouts. On a first run, survival is the goal. By the fifth run, the smart play is a planned route. That’s the depth that keeps score chasers playing long after the credits.

Scoring and the Metagame

The multiplier and combo system turns Nex Machina from a solid shooter into a lasting one. Survival is only the minimum. A high score depends on keeping your combo chain going, which requires steady aggression without mistakes. Friend leaderboards add social pressure, and the community boards show how far skilled players can take the system.

This is also where the game will split its audience. If rankings motivate you, the game can last for dozens of hours. If they don’t, the campaign ends quickly. The most common complaint about the game is that the campaign is short for players who don’t care about high scores, and that complaint is fair. Nex Machina doesn’t try to hide it, and it doesn’t add filler to make the game longer. That was a principled choice, but it probably hurt sales.

Difficulty and Readability

Nex Machina is hard. The difficulty settings help new players, but the game is built around a tough challenge, and some players will find it punishing rather than rewarding. The bigger issue is readability. In the busiest moments, voxel debris, projectiles, enemy spawns and weapon effects all compete for space on screen. Sometimes the spectacle hides what you need to see. When a shooter depends on dodging precisely, any moment where you can’t see the threat undercuts that. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens most in the fights where accuracy matters most.

Weapons, Arena Mode and Co-op

Lasers, rockets and the sword each change how you approach a room. The sword is the most interesting because it forces a close-range, high-risk style that fits the dash well. Arena mode adds challenge stages that extend the game once you’ve mastered the campaign, and they give you more content if the main levels start to feel repetitive.

Local co-op works but mainly adds to the chaos. Two players doubles the amount happening on screen, which makes the readability problem worse. It’s fun on a couch with a friend. It isn’t how you’ll set serious scores.

Housemarque built its reputation on voxels, and Nex Machina is its most ambitious use of them. Every enemy breaks apart into a burst of destructible voxels that scatter across the level, making each kill feel satisfying. The signed-distance-field ray tracing and morphing in the reworked engine is what makes this density possible. It’s advanced technology used for an old-fashioned purpose: making things explode as dramatically as possible.

The art direction pairs neon and bright colors with dark, mechanical environments. The world’s design is striking, although the setting is too thin for it to carry much meaning.

The interface stays mostly out of the way, which suits a game this fast. The main visual problem is the one covered above. At peak intensity, the screen is too busy, and the explosions can hide incoming fire. A toggle for effect density or stronger contrast on enemy projectiles would have addressed it.

A 2D arcade shooter of this scope is light on hardware, and a modern gaming PC should have no trouble with it. Readability, not raw performance, is the bigger concern.

On Steam, Nex Machina is designed for a controller. Two analog sticks match the game’s design, and the dash maps naturally to a trigger. Mouse and keyboard can aim more precisely, which helps with targeting, but keyboard movement is stiffer than an analog stick, and dash timing suits a gamepad better.

Steam’s friends list suits the leaderboards well, and comparing scores with friends is one of the main reasons to keep playing. Co-op is local only, so you’ll need a second controller and a second person in the room. With a PC connected to a TV, it works like a couch arcade game, which is probably the best way to play it with someone else.

Nex Machina is a focused expression of one idea: moving well should earn you a high score, and a high score should make you want to play again. Housemarque and Eugene Jarvis built a shooter where the dash, the human rescues and the multiplier all work together, and mastering them is genuinely satisfying. The voxel explosions are a highlight of the genre, and the controls earn the praise they’ve received.

The game has limits, and they’re worth weighing before you buy. The campaign is short for anyone who doesn’t care about leaderboards. The busiest moments can hide the threats you need to dodge, and the difficulty will turn away some players. None of these problems ruin the game, but together they keep it from being more than solid for anyone outside its target audience.

That lack of sales is a loss for the genre. Nex Machina was the last arcade game from a studio that did this kind of design better than almost anyone. If you like to improve through repetition and you care where your name sits on a leaderboard, we recommend it. If you want a long adventure with a story, you’ll likely be finished with it after one short playthrough.