Nitro Express Steam Charts & Stats

This game oozes charm. Honestly, it's not my usual style of game, but the aesthetics are a blast in terms of visuals, audio design, and character design, and the gameplay is easy to quickly make sense of but just deep enough to offer some meaningful choices in playstyle. It isn't a deep game, and it won't hold you too long, but the asking price is quite cheap and it certainly held my attention all throughout. Very enjoyable experience.

Beautiful aesthetics with pixel art, great music (hope they can release the sound track in the future), fulfilling story (although it's a bit short but still a complete one at least) with post-story missions (>2x the main story missions in terms of numbers) and not to mention blowing things up with an array of guns, explosives and gadgets (P.S. in the game there's magazine which the horoscope suggests a random weapon is buffed or debuffed before you start a mission which is a funny if not tedious gimmick to encourage you playing with different equipment, believe it or not...) this is a pretty nice game for around 80 HKD which you can complete the basics within 5 hours (apart from the unlockables). Still, it has its own flaws. While the art is beautiful, it can be really overwhelming and becomes a clusterfxxk when the screen is filled with enemies, projectiles and explosions so sometimes it can be quite difficult to navigate your character. It also has a lot of grinding, whether it is earning enough money to unlock weapons and gadgets or leveling up the weapons. It also lacks some information to explain in-game stuff which can be confusing such as the weapon levels (basically increasing weapon damage and kinda shortens reloading time I guess but it is never explained) and the stats between different shooting positions (this affects the accuracy and I think it may even affects the damage but it is never explained as well). The controls are a bit clumsy, especially when you try to shoot upwards at airborne enemies and switch aiming between two sides. I really love the story CGs, they are lovely but there is no way to view them except replaying the story missions again while you cannot skip or fast forward the in-game dialogues and it would be really nice to have a gallery mode to see those CGs again. All in all, I would give this game a 7-8 out of 10. It has its own charm, but not without obvious flaws that needs polishing.

Interesting run and gun reminiscent of metal slug, but more anime-looking and with more tanky control, it mostly feels more like doing crowd control than about shooting accurately. It DO work in that regard that said, and with a good amount of possible gun and gadget very things a good bit, as do the optional mission modes that add a good amount of small tages to the package. Not a perfect game, but definitely a fun one, and the old anime/16 bits look hel giving it all a fun campy vibe. A fun way to spend an afternoon!

Fun once you get used to the controls and get out of the mindset of a run and gun. It's more of a stroll-and-gun. Metal Sluggish.

My ONLY gripe with this game is that enemy bullets are the same color as yours. This is basically a Shmup, but you are a crawler than a jet. the control is kida stiff so you can't spam dodge or jumps, but that's it. Very simple and cool thing. Oh and I wish you had more weapons. You get a lot of guns at the start that is REALLY just higher capacity. Oh, oh, and the flip from side to side when aiming the opposite directions, could be more incremental, especially when it comes to aiming closer to yourself. Very fun and simply energetic game. Oh OH, oh, the tank boss if Fuckin stupid. It gets rid of projectiles that don't even touch it, to try and force hard angles, Stop with the stupids pls, and thank you. Actually it was the MOST fun I had in the game since I had to navigate its Bullshiz. But having a Damage PHASE when you have to shoot the same area with no differance is dumb and misleading, Especially when the Weapon that is SUPPOSED TO ALWAYS wonk on a tank(Anti-tank MISSILE) Only works at an interval. NO! THAS NoT Good DESIGN! But Fee Me MOe. and now a legit complaint. SOmetimes when an enemy is attacking you can't do the ONE thing that makes you dodge fire. A lot of the time, when I'm being attacked, I can't roll. It WONT let you roll when the attack is at you, as if the character is stuck like a deer in headlights. I didn't really start noticing it until the final boss rush mission. I KNOW I'm doing the motions on time, WHY isn't it happening. Besides that, theres no real bug or hassle with this one. Also with how minimum this game is, and it's repetetive nature, Why isnt the results screen skippable or speed-up-able.

Excellent game for fans of Metal Slug, with gorgeous art and an impressive amount of detail in the weapon animations. It can be kinda hard to read the screen at times, though, and aiming is tough with a controller, so stick to KB+M.

Credit where credit is due, a lot of work was put into Nitro Express. It's a gorgeous game. However, the game does not feel right when you're at the controls. It feels laggy, even when running at full speed. I sincerely hope that more patches come and address the framerate and smoothness of this game in motion. Thanks.

Nitro Express is fun but damn is it chaotic. Fighting hordes as robots as you progress stage by stage can be pretty damn fun with its decent variety… butttttt it’s got a few chinks in the foundation in my opinion. The fixed FPS (30fps due to the engine it was built on) really causes issues for this game, timing rolls and dodges can be more difficult as a result which does hurt the overall gameplay a tad Some parts of content really feel a bit over tuned in the enemies favour. While mostly in the side missions a lot of refights against bosses tend to swarm you with smaller enemies that not only soak up your attacks but just love to swarm around you spamming melee attacks which makes some of these refights just stressful and not really that much fun…. Some equipment in the player’s arsenal needs some more balancing. I can’t say this for all the weapons you can pick from but from my experience some weapons just outclass others way to hard in their class. I felt no reason to use the other shotguns I unlocked for example because the starting shotgun was just that dang good. Some weapons just need some buffs in my opinion It is a fun game at times, However it’s built on a shaky foundation and if the developer aims to make another game like this I hope they take the time to rebuild the foundation the game will be built on. Nitro Express is worth a look if you’re interested in side scrolling action games but just be ready for some very chaotic moments.

can feel kind of clunky to start, and from what i can tell seems to lack an obvious or meaningful ranking/scoring system which i think would bolster playtime a lot, but still totally worth picking up, its super fun for what it is and particularly its very charming had me really beaming

I really wanted to like this game but it's got two fatal flaws. 1. You cannot remap controls at all. I bought this to play on my Steam Deck but the gamepad controls are quite frankly terrible. Left bumper to drop down ledges is sticky and even after messing with analog stick sensitivity aiming feels way too stiff to be effective and I often found myself struggling just to orient the character much less be able to aim precisely. If you are going to try this game regardless, [b]M+KB is REQUIRED.[/b] Even then the default keybindings are honestly kind of bad. Miliage may vary, but weapon swapping being bound to the mouse wheel when you only have two weapon slots is confusing and often it was easy to overshoot scrolling and not actually change weapons. Movement is WASD with W being jump (space bar works as well although the game does not tell you that) and S crouches. S when moving is a dodge roll which is your primary method of defense but it feels unresponsive most of the time and you're already juggling 3 other actions bound to the S key, making snap decisions to dodge roll to avoid incoming damage much more frustrating than they need to be. The E key is completely unused and I can think of several functions I'd rather have it serve. None of this would be a problem if the game let you map your own keybinds but you have to use the default control scheme. I repeat: [b]There is no button remapping in this game. You have to use the default control scheme.[/b] 2. Screen readability is terrible. The art for this game is gorgeous and absolutely its main selling point. I can tell that a very talented pixel artist put a lot of work into making this game look good. Unfortunately, there is so much detail and clutter on the screen at once that it becomes difficult to actually read the screen. I'd often lose track of where the player character actually is on the screen or get hit and have to pause and look at the screen to figure out where the damage came from. In some levels its hard to tell what exists in the foreground as an obstacle or cover and what's simply a background element that you can just walk past. Both actual gameplay elements (bullet trails, explosive markers, the player's crosshairs, enemies, items, UI ect.) are given the same level of focus as NPCs in the background, the stage, obstacles, NPC and environment animations ect. Coupled with the control scheme issues above, it makes getting through what are conceptually very simple, run and gun arcade style levels and gameplay feel needlessly complex and frustrating. If you're going to bother with this game at all, make sure you get it on sale like I did. I think issue #2 is too baked into the game to fix, but I can see the game still being decent enough to recommend with a caveat if full custom keybinding is added in an update. Unfortunately, I can't recommend it as is and I am very disappointed with how this turned out. You absolutely CANNOT have an action game with bad controls or an unreadable screen and this game unfortunately has both and it takes everything else down with it.