Nexuiz Review

Nexuiz is just as much an enigma as how to pronounce its name. Rapidly paced, twitchy arena shooters don't surface all that often these days, but the genre is far from dead, at least judging from how many people are still way into competitive Quake and Unreal Tournament. It seems like a new one would be something worth getting excited over, but Nexuiz adds a little novelty to the form, and what it does bring seems at odds with the purity of competition that has helped much older games endure. There's not much overtly bad about Nexuiz, but it just doesn't seem to have much reason to exist, especially on PC.

Fast as Hell

To its credit, Nexuiz gets the fundamentals mostly right. It's fast as hell, and this PC version has been tweaked to play even faster than its console counterparts. Maps are well designed and occasionally visually interesting, with item placement that affords multiple routes for acquisition and denial. Weapons include specialized guns with situational functionality and more general implements of destruction for rapidly changing situations. All together, it doesn't make for a bad game at all. It's competent, but unremarkable.


Nexuiz's first and most notable shortcoming has to be the maximum size of matches, which is limited to a sparse 4v4. It's a particularly odd limitation, because several of the maps feel like they were designed for a larger number of players. Large arenas are split into multiple levels where all too often I found myself roaming around looking for someone -- anyone -- to shoot at. This is, of course, provided you can find a full game and nobody drops, which is such a rare alignment of the stars right now that it's scarcely worth mentioning.

The armory consists of a bog-standard, utilitarian mix of shotguns, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, and a sniper weapon. Uncreative alternate fire modes mostly just mean a tighter spread pattern or higher damage shot with a lower rate of fire. There's no single particular weapon or fire mode that really stands out as unique or original. The BFGs and Redeemers of the Quake and Unreal series may be frequently impractical, but they're at least distinct and memorable. Something situationally useful but difficult to master, like a sticky-mine launcher, would have been very welcome, but you won't find anything like that here. As per usual for the genre you'll probably just end up falling back on the rocket launcher most of the time.

It's All a Blur

Character models are equally uninspired, featuring red guys and blue guys, with three minor variations of each that you probably won't be able to notice in the middle of the hyper-active action, anyway. No, every game doesn't need a sexed-up crack whore model or a giant eyeball running around on its hands, but that's just one more way in which Nexuiz manages to be utterly nondescript.


Finally, Nexuiz provides a grand total of nine maps to play on, with three dedicated to capture the flag and six for team deathmatch. Those are the only modes, and it doesn't take long to nail down the nuances of each. Nexuiz isn't nearly so popular that we'd be likely to see that list expanded on by fans, even if it provided for that possibility. Of those maps about half of them are visually engaging as well as fun to play on, though not quite so interesting as the "futuristic Victorian" style described in promotional materials. Really, the most Victorian thing about Nexuiz is the old-fashioned wallpaper on the loading screens.

The one thing that truly sets Nexuiz apart from anything that's come before is its dynamic mutator system. Throughout the course of a match mutators can be picked up which can be used to alter the match in over a hundred distinct ways. These can be enormous global changes, like reducing gravity, providing everyone on the field with jet packs, or granting everyone instagib guns for a short period of time. Others are more straightforward self-buffs like invincibility or increased jump height, or negative effects to inflict on opponents like causing them to drop all their equipment, or see everything in a monochrome that makes it hard to immediately distinguish friend from foe. Still others are almost completely frivolous, like a the "farty poopy" mutator, which replaces all the sound effects with... well, farty poopy sounds. Or another which replaces everyone's heads with the face of an art director. Achievements unlock additional mutators, and points acquired by playing matches can be used to assign "pips" to each mutator, making them more likely to appear.

Luck of the Draw

Mutators are fun and all, but they do detract from what might be the most fundamental appeal of fast-paced arena shooters: the purity of the competition. Sure, they have strategic uses -- swapping your position with an opponent at the right point in a CTF match can be a game-changer. But they're just so random most of the time that there's always a question of whether you won or lost a match because of someone's crappy luck.


Again, Nexuiz is by no means a bad game. It does, however, seem like a superfluous one. Remaking the original and putting it out as a budget console download made some amount of sense, given that it was already available on PC, Mac, and Linux. Bringing it back around to PC, even at a reasonable $10 price, seems much less necessary, given the existence of multiple free alternatives with large player bases. Especially when one of those alternatives is Nexuiz itself, minus the fancy CryEngine 3 graphics, but that's not much of a trade when the game in question is already a ghost town a week after release.

Personally, I'm beginning to suspect that the twitchy arena shooter might just be the shark of game genres; it got it right so early on that it just hasn't had to evolve since. Nexuiz doesn't challenge that perception.


Spy Guy says: The arena shooter genre sure is a rarity these days. The only other recent release I can think of is Quake Live, and that's a remake of Quake III Arena. What's your favorite twitch shooter of all time?