Space Avenger – Empire of Nexx Reviews

you have to grind a little, but fun :)

Nice and addictive casual shooter. I really enjoyed upgrading my ship and playing with various weapon combinations. Collecting all upgrades and beating stages on the highest difficulty is pleasantly challenging and a simple resource system via destroying meteors adds a cool strategy element in later stages.

The translation is bad, but I could overlook that if the gameplay were any good. Unfortunately, the keyboard control scheme is awful and the game doesn't support key remapping. I assume this game was a minimal-effort port of the Switch version, with no real effort to make it playable via keyboard. Movement controls are bound to the arrow keys, so you're out of luck if you happen to prefer WASD. On top of that, secondary controls are mapped to ESDF instead of WASD, so if your fingers naturally fall to WASD while gaming, you'll continually feel like your fingers are in the wrong place.

Got as far as the language select screen, where only left & right keys worked - apparently this is a keyboard/controller-only game and well... you need the controller to actually select the language to start with. since i rely on a keyboard/mouse configuration with optional driving wheel (for racing games of course), this makes the game an unplayable one for me... ps, the 0.2 hrs recorded activity was just basically me being stuck at the unresponsive language select screen, so don't assume i had any play time with the game!

Unlike other reviewers for this game, I don't mind the grindiness of the title. There's enough upgrades and such that it makes it worth it for a player like me whose a fan of shmups, particularly games like Sky Force, which I find this title to be very reminiscent of. I play this while I've got lengthy youtube playlists rolling on my other monitor. It's a good pick up and play space shmup. I also think the price point is just right for the length and replayability. Only cons are that sometimes the autoaim can become a hinderance when you're trying to take down a larger ship that's spawning endless swarms of tiny ones. Tends to go for the swarm rather than the spawning mechanism... later on you can unlock black holes that can aid in pulling the swarm away enough to hit the spawner, but it feels a bit cumbersome. The other con.. and I don't know if this is just me because I havent seen anyone else bring this up, but I can't make this game 1920x1080. Even in full screen, it looks like the resolution is at half that with a giant black border... so I end up playing in windowed mode. The game options are no help in this department as there are NO video setting options. Probably a deal breaker for some.

I don't get the negative reviews. This game is exactly as advertised. Nice action, very nice visuals and really good sound design. The upgrade system and resource collecting adds good motivation.

I can't say I recommend it. It's a top down shooter where enemies spawn in waves, it might have been good if it was released 25 years ago but it doesn't really compete with similar modern offerings. It's very short and repetitive at 15$, and there's a pretty big lack of polish, like no in-game volume controls or control mappings, and I had to set the default language. For length, has "difficulty is content" as a mechanic, and I got to the "Epilogue" in 4 hours. The graphics are okay for this kind of game The music is good but repetitive The gameplay is mediocre, but the difficulty is decent challenge There are other games with similar gameplay that are just better.

After several hours in this game, I have come mainly to one conclusion. I feel bad for the money I spent. The game is basically a mediocre shooter with mobile style controls (you autoaim nonstop with almost no control over where to aim) and there is a horrible grind to it. The graphics are servicable, the sound is servicable, nothing breathtaking. It's not technically *bad*. It just makes you wonder after paying 15 bucks what you paid for. The writing in the game contains errors after you switch to english, typos or even words leftover in french. There are no mouse controls but the game has buttons...? Why? Furthermore, the biggest challenge in the game is either being overwhelmed by enemies because you didn't grind enough to get better weapons, of which there are only 3 main weapons locked to shiptypes, minus the skills you use, OR the fact that some enemies can simply outright murder you without you having any chance to fight back. Some basic enemies can oneshot you with insanely fast missiles and they don't fire a single one, no, they fire several. Also they can and will fire from offscreen and they fly faster than anything else in this game, making dodging impossible. So you die randomly. Then you grind so you don't die. And even after that you still die. <- this is the non fun part The grind consists of running the same missions over and over again on easy mode, because there is literally no point in going for medium or hard since you get the same payout. And then you make like... in the beginning about 300 stars maybe? Middle game 700? depends where you grind and how good you are. And then you have upgrades that give you tiny advantages that cost you like 3000+ stars. Grind. Die. Repeat. Eventually you progress, which is not something you can really enjoy because all the game does is throw more enemies at you. I rarely had a moment where I can say "I got here because of skill, not luck". This is what pains me. The bossfights are decent, those are actually fun. They are not random. The bosses don't use unreasonable weapons to artificially make the game hard. The rest of the game is just a slog. For 12,49€... yeah, I should have gotten something better. The quality is not there and the game is ultimately not motivating.