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Good

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: October 12, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I'll start off by saying this game is not for everyone. If you buy this expecting the latest Warcraft ripoff in space you'll be disappointed. If you buy this looking for in-depth tactical space combat, you're getting your money's worth.

Gameplay is fully 3D, but maneuvering is made easy by simple commands and a competent AI. A detailed loadout screen precedes every battle, with many options for each slot on your ship(s). The battles themselves range from stealthy (and sometimes frustrating) sabotage missions to full out space battles between dozens of warships. In an interesting design choice, ships move in a fairly realistic way. Each ship has massive banks of retro thrusters to stop it, and turns using thrusters on the top and sides.

The gameplay ranges from slow-paced tactical battles between pairs of light warships to large, fast-paced assaults. The different sides are well balanced, largely because they mount very similar weapons. I could have used a little more difference between races. Missions are almost always long and rewarding; there are many different mission types throughout the game.

Graphically the game is excellent, considering its 2004 release date. Ships move with a real sense of mass and inertia, torpedoes and lasers fly, fighters weave, and artillery weapons produce truly spectacular explosions. On my medium range system (running at 1024 with highest settings and anisotropic filtering) I only ran into slowdowns during the fiercest battles, but the framerate never dipped below playable rates. The only problem with the graphics is the lack of an anti-aliasing option.

The musical score is symphonic, which can be nice but is mostly hit or miss. It is usually barely noticeable. There is one excellent chanting track that plays in a couple of missions, but some of the music is downright annoying.

My only real complaints about this game are the sometimes poor voice-acting and a tendency for missions to require multiple play-throughs. I suppose it should be expected for a foreign-language import but the voice acting detracts from the cutscenes and mission briefings. Some missions require fairly specific weapons loadouts -- the loading screen won't let you start without at least one of the weapons you'll need on at least one ship, but you can guess you'll need more than one of the correct weapons or shields to have a chance in the mission.

Seriously buggy

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 10
Date: June 11, 2005
Author: Amazon User

While certainly eye-popping in terms of graphics, this is one seriously buggy game, with crashes to desktop that have been completely unaddressed by the manufacturer. Multiple emails inquiring about the next patch (the current one, version 1.01, left me wondering if the patch needed patching) have been ignored by Vivendi tech support. A little over halfway through the game, the fun will come to a crashing halt...in its current state, this game is an absolute waste of money and time. Stay clear of this one until the next patch becomes available (and even then I wouldn't be so sure...).

Great game, Sierra outdid themselves from previous games.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: May 31, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Honestly, even being biased towards Sierra games, they seriously outdid themselves with this title, surpassing all their previous games. The gameplay is wonderful, (Well, once you kind of get past the annoying beginning phases - Which lack any sort of good commands, since it's sort of teaching you.) the graphics are splendid for such a large game, (Not the best per se, but by far not the worst!) and the sound overall is nicely done. Voice overs, music score. Lip synching is good in game, since that the actual mission briefings lack animation of character avatars.
Another nice perk of the game is actually being able to zoom out and view the whole galaxy and the solar systems you've visited. (I personally like the zooming effects they used)
The strategy, once you are able to actually control all aspects of your vessel, is wonderful. Granted, the AI decides to take better judgement and control most of the ships functions on it's own.. Which I find annoying, so I personally select which systems I want to use and which ones I don't manually. Ship placing and defense and offense strategies are frequent, from scouting missions to full on war, it needs to be used. Fighters are common for defense, as much as offense, (And they HAVE to be used, sometimes.) and are quite handy to have. Love them and keep them close.
Overall, since I do believe I've rambled enough;it's a great game to have if you like formations of different strategies, use of them on the spot and in the future, it never really fails to produce. A must have for strategy fans, sci-fi fans, and people that generally want a good time without a whole lot of fuss. (Not saying there isn't any fuss, 'cause there is. Just not a whole lot.)

Good game if you give it a chance

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: March 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

When I first picked up this game and tried to play it, the intro scene interested me. I go to play the game, and the interface is really really wierd. After a couple hours of trying to get down the interface the game gets very interesting. The story is amazing in it and the gameplay is awesome once you get used to it, but when one first picks up this game it seems a bit overwhelming. Awesome game if you love games that are a little experimental.

Sweet!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: April 24, 2006
Author: Amazon User

First off, to REALLY enjoy the game you need a big surrond sound system and a big monitor, but hey, what game dont you have to have thoes things? But anyway, this game is awsome. Pretty much, the game says you have to do X things each mission and then sets you free. You decide which weapons to equip your ships with, and more importanly, WHERE to equip them. This game is played in 3 dimentions, so weapons mounted on the bottom of your ship cant fire at targets above unless the ship rolls over or flips around (it does it automatically). It also has some funny dialogue (like commander Sweetwater calling your AI a "cyber pet" and "anal-retentive ignoramous"). The graphics are spectacular, they really took advantage of the space setting to give wonderfully detailed objects and backgrounds.

There are some cons tho, namely there is NO ending! You complete your final objective, you see a little cutscene that ends with your AI saying that shes going to kill gods, and it ends. You never know what happened to most of your friends or anything...guess they all end up killed.Guess this really cane be called a con, but for a while your under the command of Rear/Vice-Admiral someguy, who puts you down every chance he gets, even after you save his life...TWICE! And he does other things that make life much harder for you for a while, but that just adds an interesting part.

DOnt be intimidated by the commands and everything, once you get used to them its aight, and once you get over the lack of sleep from staying up all night and playing this, its aight too.

Great Game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: March 11, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is an extremely good game.

Graphics-1000/10--The grpahics are just phenominal. its unlike anyhting i have ever seen. i make 3D and i dont know how ANYONE could make this. you can also watch your ships fly through the air which is extremely cool.

Sound-9/10--There could have been more game music, but besides for that I would have given it a 10/10.

Gameplay-7/10--Overall the gameplay is hard at first. After playing it a few times it gets easier, but its still hard

Overall-9/10--This is an extremely good game, but I suggest just playing around with it for an hour before trying to doing any real playing

Fun, but too buggy for commercial release

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: December 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Nexus is a very entertaining game that is severely marred by an inexusable level of instability. It seems like the program shouldn't have even passed the alpha testing stage, much less beta testing, and definitely should not have been sent out for commercial release. The game crashed to desktop, bluescreened or glitched into an unplayable state more times than I could count.

Apart from that, we have a very beautiful space sim with intuitive controls, an engaging story, and good voice acting. It was enough for me to overlook the crashes enough to get to the ending (that and I wanted to get my 40 bucks worth). Unfortunately, the lack of stability keeps me from rating this game any higher.

Very Buggy and too much micro-management

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 16
Date: September 19, 2005
Author: Amazon User

In all honesty I can deal with the tedious micromangement of the game itself, but the bugs are horrendous! After an entire day of constant crashing and/or booting me to the desktop I decided to dump the game in the garbage. I have never been so frustrated with a game that has potential yet failed so miserably. No patches worth downloading.
What little game play I got out of it was allot of micro-management of your ships (no custom default loads) and combat that can actually take over an hour real time.

DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY!!!!!

Excellent Graphics

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: July 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The graphics for this game are absolutely amazing. However, the gameplay is very linear yet grasping. Once the game is started, you won't want to stop until the story ends. You even get tied up in the extremely intense battles later in the game.

Amazing Game! Definitely Worth a Look!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 07, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Originally I had never heard of this game. But about a month after it's launch I read good reviews for it on several gaming sites (Gamespot, IGN, GamePro, etc.) so I decided to try it out.

This game is amazing!

The graphics look stunning, and are very detailed. I haven't seen a space game this good since EvE Online. They look great! The ships are well designed, the backgrounds are beautiful, and best of all, huge explosions!

The game is also a lot of fun to play. Although it is a bit hard to get used to the controls, you are given the option to pause the game at anytime (with the space bar key) and to take your time and issue out the exact orders you want to your fleet. After you get adjusted to the controls, you can move on to the advanced controls where you can give exact commands to each ship in your fleet: target ship A with gun B, hit ship B with missile C, repair your shields not your missile launcher, etc.

The story itself is also very deep, and it caught me almost instantly. I was already interested in the story before I even finished the 'training missions' (the first two or three missions are really simple and are more oriented toward introducing the player to the controls). The voice acting helped a lot with the story as well. They really added to the feel of the game.

However, there are three things I didn't like about the game:
1) The story was too short! There are only about 25 missions or so and the first three are basically training missions. However, there are several downloadable campaigns available that have been released by fans available on the Internet. Although they aren't nearly as good as the original campaign, they are pretty decent and let you enjoy the game's systems - gameplay, graphics, etc. - a bit more. You can find these on the official forums.
2) A lot of it takes some trial and error. I think some of the other reviewers posted this, and they are right. The order in which to do things is never really given. Also since configuring your ship correctly can be the difference between success and failure, it'd be nice to know what to expect in the next mission, but that is rarely (actually I think almost never) the case.
3) There's nobody to multiplayer with! This is a shame because multiplayer is surprisingly fun! There's the usual deathmatch / team deathmatch modes, but I think the funnest has to be the skirmishes. You can challenge your friends and each of you is given a fleet of ships to see who can get the most kills or score the most points, etc.

Don't worry about the crashes that others have complained about in the other reviews. Those have been addressed with the v1.01 patch. (in fact, the North American version of the game comes already patched - it was released in Europe first).

Nexus: The Jupiter Incident was a lot of fun for me. It's sad that not that many people got to enjoy the game. I really liked it and I think there are many others out there that will like it too. So give it a shot!

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