Daemon X Machina

The first negative that beats your eyes and accompanies you throughout the game is the plot. A story trailer (even with Polish subtitles) circulates on the web, which won't tell you anything about the history of the game. Maybe apart from the fact that something bad happened to the moon, the Earth of the future is not a futuristic paradise, and the characters drawn alive from some standard anime fight in their big mosses.

I understand that maybe that was the idea of the scriptwriters - to follow the line of the least resistance, providing the n-th version of the story of defending the Earth against evil robots (in short). And all this in the aesthetics of genre anime with one-dimensional characters, practically every one of whom is a walking stereotype. Don't get me wrong - I like Japanese animated films very much and I don't mind grotesque characters throwing imaginary clichés. At the same time, the feature interludes, which were a pretext for further missions, disturbed me more than motivated me to continue playing.

I started with bitter paragraphs, but fortunately Daemon X Machina is not only a plot (or rather to a small extent). What counts here is the dynamic action, interrupted by long visits to the hangar, where we are preparing the mecha for the next mission. As I mentioned at the beginning, Daemon X Machina is a child of the people responsible for Armored Core. Both titles show common elements, so if you've ever had contact with AC and didn't let yourself be seduced by its charms, then DXM may not appeal to you either.

Daemon X Machina is not a typical TPP shooter/action game in which we defeat various missions and experience unforgettable adventures. All the fun comes down to defeating a hordes of enemies or defending some point in the designated area. The pleasure comes from testing various settings and variants of our moss, which can be freely modified according to your needs.

Each hand can carry a different weapon, additional death tools can be mounted on the back or arms. You can choose from assault rifles, rocket launchers, energy swords, flamethrowers, homing missiles, etc. For this we choose various elements of armour and other parts, which will make our moss a flying beast sending rain of missiles, a ground warrior fighting in a short circuit. Or a bizarre hybrid that only we can harness.

Running away from the hangar straight to the next mission and not burying in Arsenal's guts (as they call the mechae here), you lose half the pleasure that Daemon X Machina can offer. However, if you like to play futuristic mechanic, and the hour to choose stickers or armor color is not a waste of time for you, you will be in the seventh heavens. Daemon X Machina has a lot to offer in this respect and fortunately it doesn't duplicate all the sins of Armored Core. I mean the terrible UI in Armored Core V. In the menu for selecting parts for the moss, you had to stare at them for hours. And after a dozen or so minutes the interface could drive you crazy.

Folding your dream moss is a great pleasure, but you don't do it to admire it in the hangar (although you can, as an empty HUB with an Arsenal in the middle encourages). The biggest fun begins on the battlefield, where it is crawling with various machines. More or less mobile, flying or terrestrial, but in any case not very intelligent. The work of destruction is accompanied by a great soundtrack and a wonderful graphic design, which perfectly combines the aesthetics of the goal-shading with expressive colors. The artistic direction is the strong point of Daemon X Machina. Wherever the simplicity of the models or various simplifications are offended, the game makes up for the great effects of explosions and other trifles, creating a truly pleasing whole.

This is best seen in the fight against powerful bosses. In standard stages, the initial fascination passes, as monotony and repetitiveness creep in very quickly. After two of the campaign planned for a dozen or so hours, we saw practically everything. Opponent models and landscape types do not surprise us at all, and we just wait for the next big boss to bring in a breath of fresh air.

A great addition to the fun is cooperation for up to four players, but unfortunately there is no PvP. And such a game is begging for some competitive modes. Apart from a dozen or so hours of campaigning, we have a number of side missions, which allow us to earn money for new parts and gain helpers. There is an ability tree, a modification of the hero's appearance and a number of other possibilities, which the game does not communicate in a clear way. So it's worth to bury in the options on your own, for example, to freely adjust the appearance of the HUD to your needs. Because the default interface is heavily overloaded with information and indicators. One of the few options that we have to choose at the start is the language of the game. You can't count on the Polish version, but there is Japanese/English dubbing and the same subtitles.

Daemon X Machina is a very specific and targeted game. Beautiful, dynamic, but spectacular actions shown on trailers is only one of the foundations on which all fun is based. The second is sitting on the menu and moving the tone of iron, which we will attach to our Arsenal. And then we will paint it. And we will decorate it. And then we will check how it will look like with a bazooka instead of a sword, and so on over and over again....

Fighting is great, control is easy, and the ability to create your dream mecha is a real pleasure. The repetitiveness of enemies, missions and locations is a nuisance, as is the weak AI of even the smarter enemies (bosses, enemy Arsenals). All of this makes Daemon X Machina one of the best places for me to put at the end of the September shopping list.