Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Worth playing"

Nexus: The Jupiter Incident has a lot of hurdles in getting people to play it; not only was it not very well-known due to lack of marketing, it was also a game with full six-axes physics, which can be disorienting to many people. Most importantly, for those who knew of its existence, it will be inevitably compared with the Homeworld franchise, which is another that dares to employ similar physics.

(Side note: the six axes of movement are three axes of translation across three mutually perpendicular axes of direction, and three planes of rotation that are in turn normal to these axes. In other words, it is fully 3D movement, without convenient limitations like gravity to restrict the movement of models.)

However, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident comes into its own with sophisticated mechanisms for ship configurations and other features that make exploring this game's version of space fun.

Nexus's premise is introduced rather quickly, via a monologue by the protagonist of the game, who is apparently a naval commander that is talented but has a history as a celebrity that he is not comfortable with. Humanity had somewhat taken to the stars, but an accident in space exploration has stalled progress into the final frontier. Meanwhile, humanity had wasted no time arming spaceships with weaponry, including what appear to be nuclear missiles.

A player may find that the gameplay can be daunting, so he/she may want to consider perusing the tutorial first. The tutorial holds the player's hands tightly though, disabling a lot of commands to shoehorn the player into enacting very specific commands. It is also at best basic, and will not teach the player advanced tactics or nuances with certain commands. Still, it does teach the most important fundamental of the game, which is the physics that govern the movement of spacecraft.

The single-player campaign, however, is a lot more fun. The player takes on the role of Marcus Cromwell, the aforementioned protagonist. The appeal of his character is almost apparent from the moment that he was introduced; he is soft-spoken and slightly jovial, yet is also firm and level-headed. His captain's log, which the player can read before starting a mission, will also reveal that he is not a person without insecurities.

Anyway, the first mission in the single-player campaign has the player handling very basic but somewhat believable spacecraft, which can be described as mobile variants of the International Space Station, albeit heavily armed. As is to be expected of a space-based epic, a routine patrol mission turns out to be the start of a saga that surpassed the expectations of the protagonist.

So as not to get ahead of itself, this review would first describe the basic functionalities of spacecraft in this game. In this game, a space vessel has propulsion systems that allow it to move about in the void of space.

However, it has to be mentioned here that there is no discernible mechanism or physics-scripting to accommodate for collisions between ships and space-borne objects. Ships appear to simply go around each other, whereas space objects like asteroids would be merely static hindrances that ships go around.

Of course, one can argue that the technology of the computer platform at the time was perhaps not advanced enough for more sophistication like ramming tactics and pushing asteroids into ships.

On the other hand, there are representations of space-related anomalies that have impact on gameplay in this game. These will be described later.

Anyway, returning to the matter of spacecraft propulsion, spaceships always have thrust engines at their rear, which allows them to at least move forward in space. The engines also allow them to turn a little, an effect that is portrayed via different thrusters firing in and out of tandem. However, with only just these engines, a space vessel has very limited agility. To be more nimble, it needs secondary engines, but these are something that would be described later, as they do not appear so early in the campaign.

A space-ship's engines can be separately targeted from its hull during battle; without functioning engines, a space-ship is very much dead in space. There are other ways to immobilize a ship too, such as taking away power from its engines; all engines tap energy from support generators, which can be disabled to starve engines of power. Support generators also supply other systems of the ship.

In addition, every ship that is armed needs to tap power from weapon generators to fire its weapons, or at least tap it from its ultimately limited energy reserves, which are depicted with a meter that is composed of a bar and some numbers for more accurate depiction of remaining reserves.

The player has to manage energy usage for weapons and energy reserves, especially during battle, in order to maintain fire on enemies and survive or evade retaliation. Depending on the support generators of the player's ships, energy reserves does not refill as quickly as the player depletes them, or does not refill as quickly when outside of combat as the player would like. The game will not have hands-on lessons for managing energy wisely, so the player will have to learn the hard way.

On the other hand, successfully learning to do so can be a rewarding experience, as clever management of energy reserves can give the player an edge over the enemy A.I. Yet, this also highlights minor flaws in the single-player campaign, which will be described later.

In addition to managing energy reserves, the player will also need to manage the usage of missiles. As mentioned earlier, the spacecraft in this game are armed with what appears to be nukes, or sci-fi equivalents of them. Missiles are very long-ranged and can do tremendous damage to a target - if they manage to get through the defences of the target, which will be described shortly. The explosions of missiles can also destroy strike-craft and missiles caught in the blast, as well as damage other ships if they happen to make the mistake of clumping together too closely.

To protect itself from missiles and strike-craft, a space-ship has "flak" devices that are designed to shoot these down. These generally use laser pulses, though some others do fill space with shrapnel in the path of incoming missiles and strike-craft. These do take up energy that could have been used for anti-ship weapons, however.

It has to be mentioned here that flak weaponry may well be a bit too effective on strike-craft and missiles. If enemy ships are armed with them, only a barrage of missiles can overwhelm them; strike-craft fare even worse, such that it is often not feasible to have strike-craft contributing to a battle when there are multiple enemy ships with flak weaponry. It should also be noted here that missiles that are shot down do not detonate.

A ship's hull is one of its most important statistics; as to be expected of any variant of the hitpoint system that has been seen in many, many games before, once a ship's hull meter goes down to zero, it blows up and is eliminated from the game. However, blowing up a ship presents a hazard to every other ship nearby, as the explosion is massive and can well damage other ships.

However, a ship has another important statistic: number of crew. As a ship takes damage, or gets boarded (more on boarding later), its number of crew drops as casualties from the harm inflicted on the ship takes its toll in lives. As the number of crew diminishes, its performance drops: it slows down, eventually becoming a derelict when the last few crewmen are slain.

The player can choose to have a ship evacuated or have the ship and the crew fight to the last; it is more than likely that players would choose the latter in multiplayer games, as there is little incentive to preserve crew in one-off matches.

However, in the single-player campaign, evacuating a ship that is in peril is perhaps a wise move. When a ship is evacuated, the evacuating crew get on lifeboats, which then move towards the nearest friendly ship; the crew are added to the ones already on the ship, perhaps replenishing crew that has been lost earlier. Meanwhile, the evacuated ship becomes a derelict. Depending on the designs for the mission, the derelict may be recovered, and thus the ship can be repaired and re-crewed; this is rare though, due to the story designs having a lot of urgency. (There will be no more elaboration on this as it would constitute a spoiler.)

During a mission or match, there are no ways to repair the hulls of ships or replenish crew other than getting them from evacuated friendly ships during a match or mission, so the player has to make sure that his/her ships suffer as little damage as possible, or at least ensure that the exchange of harm is in the favour of the player. In the case of the single-player campaign, it is in the interest of the player to prevent as much harm to ships as possible, due to a game mechanism of resource points that is unique to the single-player campaign and which will be elaborated on later.

The first several missions happen to showcase all of the abovementioned game mechanisms, though more exciting ones will be introduced in later missions.

One of these is shielding. As to be expected of shields in a game about sci-fi spacecraft, they provide additional layers of protection for a ship; these layers also happen to be all-encompassing, e.g. there does not appear to be any weak point in a layer of shielding. Shields prevent most missiles and hull-pounding weapons from getting through, and are surprisingly resilient to such weapons; even a ship with low-quality shielding can take a lot of these before its shield drops. Furthermore, strike-craft and boarding craft can pass through shields, but not without taking some damage.

Even after it has been brought down, it only takes a while for a shield to come back up, and it comes back at 50% capacity. Furthermore, shields recharge quickly, if anything except anti-shield weaponry is brought to bear against them. If the player wants to suppress and eliminate the shielding of a ship, he/she will need to use anti-shield weaponry or destroy its shield generator, which is located on its exterior.

This is perhaps where the game falters. Due to the resilience of shields, harming ships can feel all-too formulaic; the player either has to bring down shields first before enemy ships can be pounded, boarded or harried effectively by strike-craft. Moreover, the player has to bring along anti-shield weaponry, which take up space that could have been used by other weapons and which are useless for anything else other than suppressing shields; alternatively, the player can use anti-device weaponry to take out the shield generators or the support generators that power them, but these have limitations, as will be described shortly.

There are means to bypass shields completely, but these can be countered with means other than shielding. For example, the aforementioned strike-craft and boarding craft can fly through shielding without getting destroyed outright, but they can still be shot down by flak weaponry (if they are not destroyed by flying through shielding in the first place). The same can also be said of missiles that bypass shields. (There are missiles that bypass both shields and flak, but these are reserved for particularly daunting enemies in the single-player campaign.)

Ships have systems, as mentioned earlier, or "devices", as the game calls them. These can be damaged separately from the hull of the ship. Devices include all weapons that a ship has and its critical systems, like primary generators and shield generators, as well as secondary ones; in other words, almost everything that a ship has.

Some devices are on the exterior of the ship; these include all weapons and the shield generator. These can be targeted by anti-device weaponry, which are generally laser beams that continuously target devices as long as a line of fire can be drawn from them to the targeted devices; these weaponry also happen to inflict a little bit of hull damage. Devices that are completely damaged are disabled permanently, but if they are not destroyed outright, they can be brought back with enough repairs.

Getting said lines of fire is easier said than done. The anti-device weapons can only fire at targets that are not obscured. Ships can turn and rotate such that targeted devices are turned away from fire. Anti-device weapons will also not pick other targets automatically; the player has to select other devices on the enemy ship for his/her anti-device weaponry to continue firing and not waste precious firing time. Some ships even have rotating parts with devices, which turn these away from the attention of anti-device weaponry every so often.

Yet, selecting systems is the only way to get anti-system weaponry to fire; they will not fire autonomously at any unselected systems.

Interior devices, like primary can also be targeted by anti-system weaponry, though these appear to take less damage than devices on the exterior.

All devices, as long as they have not been destroyed outright, can be repaired back to full integrity. This depends on the Engineering skill of the captain of the ship; the better his/her engineering skill is, the faster the repairs are done.

Speaking of the captain's skills, he/she has three: Engineering, Military and Science. Science is perhaps the least useful skill, as it determines how well a ship's sensors and Data Scanner work, which will be described later, but little else that is discernible. The Military skill is even vaguer, though it is described to influence a ship's combat capabilities. Engineering improves repair speed of devices, as mentioned earlier, but it also contributes to the gaining of resource points, which will be described in more detail later.

In the campaign, the player is given some respite between missions to review his/her progress in the story. Some screens show maps of the fictional galaxy that the protagonist is fighting to protect and such other things associated with the canon. These maps also contain notes and such that would be of interest to players that are invested in the story. There is also the Captain's Log, which has been mentioned earlier, if the player wants to know more about Cromwell's thoughts.

The writing for these screens is competent and in some cases – usually Cromwell's own personal thoughts – is quite interesting.

The player can watch a fully voiced-over briefing before starting the next mission. The appeal of these briefings appears to vary greatly, however; some of them are so short as to be mere instructions with just one screen to tell the player of what to do in the next mission, whereas some others are more comprehensive and even have animations. Fortunately, none of them is too off-putting.

Perhaps the screen that is of greatest interest to all players is the simply-named Fleet Screen. The first several missions in the campaign does not have this, but there is nothing much that the player can do with it; only after the player gets to control the primary ship in the game does it become practical.

The Fleet Screen can be daunting to use at first though, as the game does not provide any tutorial for this. However, it does appear to provide some visual notifications on things that the player should take note of, such as new items and ships in need of repairs. There is a list for ships, counters for Resource Points (more on these shortly) and such other indicators for information that the player needs to make decision.

There is some somewhat useless information though. For example, the Fleet Screen contains lists for characters that are aboard specific ships; however, the only character of interest is the captain, who has skills that provide certain bonuses to the ship that he/she is leading, as mentioned earlier. Ultimately, this screen is not of much use; the player cannot shift characters around ships because their assignments to ships are tightly controlled by the story. It may be of some interest to players that want to know more about the story and characters, of course.

Furthermore, only Marcus Cromwell himself develops his skills throughout the single-player campaign; the other captains do not. In addition, he is always restricted to one particular ship in the game.

Resource Points have been mentioned a few times already. Resource Points (or "RPs", which are the initials that the game itself uses) are gained and accumulated over the course of the campaign and can be used to kit out ships. However, an observant player would notice an issue that severely limits the appeal of this game mechanism: every ship has its own RP counter that only it can tap from. RPs cannot be shared among ships, which is a limitation that can be difficult to stomach. Moreover, that they share the same stockpile of devices but not the same pool of RPs can make for some disbelief.

Anyway, RPs are expended for many things. Firstly, there are repairs, if a ship has taken significant hull damage (the threshold for this is not certain, but the repair costs become higher as more damage is taken) and/or had devices destroyed.

RPs are also expended to add devices onto ships. On its own, this requirement is understandable, but it is also stacked on top of the limitation that devices are scarce in supply. The only way to get more RPs than the minimum that the game would give for finishing a mission is to have the Captain of a ship having a high rating in Engineering.

All these limitations do require the player to make some very hard decisions, especially early on in the single-player campaign, though they can feel very disadvantageous.

Yet, these limitations become less meaningful in the later stages of the campaign, when many RPs are given to the player such that he/she would be flushed with many options and the means to have them. In fact, in the latter stages of the campaign, he/she would not have enough ships and space on them to take on some of the most powerful devices in the game; there would be a surplus of them in the supply stockpile.

As for the devices themselves, they are split into several categories, though all of them share one similarity: the more powerful and potent they are, the more RPs that they require to mount on ships. There are many categories, but fortunately the game has some useful interface designs and controls to help the player save some time in configuring ships.

An example of these is the focusing on and highlighting of the same category of devices on the ship that is currently being given attention to when a player selects a category of devices in the stockpile. Empty spots are given even more visual highlighting, if any, which is a great convenience.

It has to be mentioned here though that changes to a ship, once confirmed, are final. If the player made a mistake, he/she will have to reload the game, though the game does conveniently make autosaves at the end of every mission.

The devices that have been mentioned thus far are shields, generators, main engines and energy reserves (or capacitors, as the game calls them); generally, the player only needs to upgrade to the next best one when it is introduced in the campaign. There are other devices with nuances that are more sophisticated, which will be described later.

Weapons are categorized into a few types. The first of which are so-called "Normal" weapons, which may have been named so because the game-makers could not find the best phrase to name this category with. Nevertheless, these are the weapons that ships will use most, as they encompass the anti-hull, anti-shield and anti-device weaponry that have been described earlier.

Then, there are Heavy weapons. These tend to be oversized cannons, but also include launchers for missiles. The presence of these on ships is often what differentiates the capital ships from the escort ships.

"Special" weapons are mainly flak weaponry, which have been described earlier. However, in the single-player campaign, there are weapons that are story-centric but are categorized under these anyway.

As mentioned earlier, weapons can tap their needed power to fire from two sources: the weapon generators or the ship's energy reserves. The former does not contribute to the current level of energy in the latter; they are mainly used to power weapons. The latter can only be refilled by support generators.

It may seem that the player can neglect weapon generators in favour of simply improving energy reserves by adding to and upgrading the energy cells and support generators of the ship, but weapons take a lot of energy to fire. Therefore, it is prudent for the player to pay attention to weapon generators when there are new ones to be had.

In addition to a ship's main engines, there are other engines that are mainly intended to provide it with additional mobility, i.e. making it more agile. These can be used instead of the main engines, but they are not as good at providing forward speed.

Sensors allow ships to detect enemy ships without line of sight and before they got close enough for battle to join. There are two kinds of sensors; "Active" sensors detect enemy ships from longer distances but are double-edged, as they happen to make a ship easier to be detected by other ships too, whereas the other kind of Sensors, simply called "Passive" sensors, are shorter-ranged and less effective, but allow ships to hide from other ships' active sensors until they get too close.

There are also electronic counter-measure (ECM) systems, which limit the reach of enemy sensors and muddle up the targeting of enemy weapons (an effect that is depicted by a chance that incoming enemy fire may miss). These are in turn countered by electronic counter-counter-measure (ECCM) systems, amusingly enough.

During battle, after enemy ships have been encountered for the first time, most of the devices on enemy ships are not immediately known to the player. The most immediately recognizable ones are however identified immediately, such as its main engines. The rest, such as weapons, are only revealed when enemy ships use them; prolonged encounters with these ships also gradually reveals even the most hidden of devices. Knowing what devices that enemy ships have is important, as they cannot be targeted by anti-device weapons without being identified.

If the player wants to detect unknown devices as early as possible, he/she may opt to use a Data Scanner, if he/she can accept the risks. A Data Scanner reveals devices very quickly, and given enough time, even energy reserves and missile counts. However, using the Data Scanner requires that the ship drops its shielding, which is a huge setback that limits the utility of the Data Scanner to story-centric moments in the single-player campaign. Besides, the A.I. is very quick to take advantage of any ship that drops its shielding to use the Data Scanner.

Returning to the Fleet Screen, the statistics for these devices are generally comprehensively displayed, so the player would at least know what to expect from any devices that he/she has yet to see in action. However, nuances like the sizes of hitboxes for projectiles would not be immediately apparent in the Fleet Screen.

In addition to devices, the player can also opt to give his/her ships strike-craft, or "squadrons", as the game calls them; all ships are capable of harbouring squadrons, though each one has different capacities (the bigger ones generally can host more).

Squadrons of strike-craft attack the enemy, whereas squadrons of boarding-craft adhere themselves onto enemy ships while its passengers attempt to cripple the enemy ship from within.

There are three types of strike-craft: fighters, bombers and gunboats. Fighters are primarily meant to be used against enemy squadrons, being a lot more agile than the other squadron units. Bombers are meant to be used against enemy ships, including those with shields, as their payloads penetrate shields readily (though they may sometimes make the mistake of flying through shields anyway). Gunboats are the toughest strike-craft, so they are mainly meant to be used to harass enemy ships and draw their fire away from other strike-craft, assuming that the player sends them in first.

There are several different squadron types for each category of strike-craft, though there are little nuances between them; generally, the ones that are more expensive are more powerful, so in the campaign, the player only needs to swap them in and out as new ones appear.

Boarding-craft squadrons are intended to deliver commandos into enemy ships and hobble them from within. Gameplay-wise, they are little more than units that apply de-buffs on enemy ships; the player has little control of this process beyond selecting which devices to target. (This also happens to direct the fire of anti-device weaponry on the player's own ships.)

Furthermore, the commandos will take casualties as long as they stay inside the enemy ship; the rate of attrition appears to depend on the number of remaining crew on the enemy ship that is being boarded. Most importantly, it is next to impossible to have boarding craft come close to an enemy ship as long as its flak weaponry are still online; the A.I. certainly will fire on boarding craft that comes too close, and it is unlikely that human opponents would even allow boarding-craft to even approach.

It has to be mentioned here that squadrons, unlike other things that can go into a ship, can be lost permanently even if the player succeeds in a mission. If a squadron is completely annihilated during battle, it is lost and has to be replaced, together with RP expenditure. Squadrons with missing members also have to replenished, which also require RPs.

On the other hand, squadrons can be repaired by sending them back to ships, so the player can still resort to hit-and-run tactics, though the amount of micro-management from having to enact such tactics and handle the ships can be daunting. Moreover, squadrons do not need to be sent back to their original mothership; they can be transferred to the closest ship, assuming that the other ship has the space to support them in its hangars.

It has to be mentioned here that commandos in boarding craft will not be replenished when said craft returns to a friendly ship. This is unfortunate, as it severely reduces the utility of boarding.

As mentioned earlier, learning the nuances of the game gives the player an edge over the A.I. in the single-player story campaign. However, when this happens, an observant player may notice that the A.I. is not really superbly competent. While it certainly will punish mistakes on the player's part, if the player plays cautiously, e.g. having the right ships take the brunt of attacks and the others flank or bombard enemies with missiles when convenient, the A.I.'s flaws are revealed; they are quite single-minded and are often not able to adopt the same tactics that the player would use.

In fact, in some missions, enemies resort to rigid patterns of attack, such as bombarding the player's ships with missiles, without any change regardless of how many times the player replays the mission.

Although combat may be a little formulaic and there are setbacks to some methods of attacking the enemy, engaging in combat is not a matter of frustration as the controls that are provided to manage combat are quite adequate, though it can be rather confusing if the player has come off the Homeworld games and are expecting similar controls.

During missions or matches, the game makes use of a user interface that relies on tabs and lists to help the player keep track of things. These lists contain icons for ships and their squadrons, as well as objects of interest in space, such as beacons and derelicts.

These lists are adequate when battles involve only several ships, but in the latter stages of the campaign, there are a lot more; the lists can get so long as to require more than a little scrolling to get to the entry for a ship or object that the player wants to look at, which can be a hassle. Fortunately, the player can somewhat have a shortcut to this entry by selecting the ship or object in the actual game world (or rather, game space), upon which the display for the list will automatically update to present the icon for said ship or object.

The player can also create groups of units, not unlike many other real-time strategy games. However, the player can only create up to four groups by default; the rest of the number keys have been reserved for other commands. The player can alter the keyboard mapping to allow the creation of more groups, but there are already so many commands with hotkeys that it would take quite a lot of work to alter and redefine hotkeys for the others.

Ships under the player's control can be directed to move towards another ship or object in space, either by clicking on the latter in the game world, or its icons in the aforementioned lists; the ships will then follow the latter, if the latter is mobile, either to engage it in combat or to escort it, depending on whether the latter is a friendly or an enemy. These are context-sensitive commands that are performed by default when sending ships over to something else in space, so the player may want to consider making use of specific commands if the players want to do something else.

These other specific commands have on-screen depictions, though they are tucked in toolbars that can add to the clutter on the screen.

To somewhat simplify control over ships, the player can set their general behaviour to one of three, which are Aggressive, Defensive and Stealth. Aggressive has ships doggedly pursuing and engaging any enemies that have been detected. Defensive has ships diverting as much power as possible to shields and only retaliate when attacked, but not before. Stealth has the ship disabling its active sensors, switching to the use of devices that are difficult to be detected by enemy sensors and/or turning on cloaking devices, if any.

(There will be more elaboration on the stealth mechanisms in the game later.)

However, a meticulous player may want to consider manually controlling the ships under his/her command. Unfortunately, when set to manual, ships will not do anything else that is not the player's direction, including even defending themselves from nearby enemy ships that are shooting at them, unless they have been directed to attack these. Moreover, manually given orders are largely ignored when ships are set to any behaviour other than Manual; they do not even follow simplified orders.

Speaking of simplified orders, examples of these are "Attack Devices" and "Attack Hulls", which have ships attacking only devices and hulls of enemy ships, respectively. These simplified orders can be delivered via the row of function keys, most of which are convenient to use.

However, a few of the simplified orders can be problematic, or even useless in game modes other than the single-player campaign. For example, there is "Artillery Attack", which is a combination of the "Run Away!" simplified command and the orders for launching missiles. This command has ships keeping a very long distance from enemy ships while firing missiles, but more often than not, this is impractical, as ships can only fire missiles while facing enemies directly and there are few ships that have reverse thrusters that allow them to face enemies while backing away.

Moreover, ships on this command will fire any missile indiscriminately; considering that there are a significant number of missile types for different situations, this is a waste.

Some of the orders that are only useful in the single-player campaign include commands to have ships zipping away from battle using their faster-than-light means of travel. If the player does not wish to reload a previously saved game and is facing the prospect of losing ships, he/she can have them engage their IP drives and pull out of battle as blazing comets, which is a very impressive graphical effect.

For players who are meticulous, the game provides means to do more than just issue general orders. The means to target individual devices on ships have already been described earlier, though not how; the game facilitates this by bringing up a list of devices at the bottom of the screen. There can be a lot of buttons with text though, so this is not for people who do not like looking at such user interface (UI) layouts.

In addition to means to target specific devices on enemy ships, the player can alter the power supply levels of the systems on a ship; people who enjoy the management of ships in sci-fi franchises such as Star Trek would be quite enamoured at the prospect of doing so in this game. What they would find not enamouring is the default amount of space in the UI that is given to this feature.

Clicking on icons in this part of the UI allow the player to divert energy reserves over to four aspects of the ship: Shields, Weapons, Engines and Support. There are no controls for finer adjustments of energy allocation; the player can only set power levels at "+50%" or "+100%", which may seem somewhat vague. The results are certainly not vague though, as the aspect of a ship that gets allocated more energy generally performs better than when allocated energy supplies at default levels.

It is worth noting here that all aspects can be set to very power-hungry levels; raising supplies to one does not lower those for the rest. Instead, the ship's energy reserves go down a lot faster, but as long as the ship's energy reserves remain above empty, the ship will perform admirably enough. Therefore, it is in the player's interest to have ships recharge their energy levels after every hostile encounter that has been successfully handled.

Unfortunately, this part of the interface may not be suitable for said hostile encounter, at least by default; it is rather small, which is an oddity as it would be one of the most heavily used features. The contrast is especially noticeable compared to other parts of the UI that the player would use less, such as the toolbar for simplified commands, which can generally be accessed via hotkeys.

There are also stealth mechanisms in this game, the subtlety of which can seem surprising, and especially to those who have played the Homeworld games.

All ships and their devices produce what is called "emission", which is described by the game as the heat output and/or exhaust substances e.g. gases that they expel. The higher the emissions of the ship, the more likely it is to be detected by sensors on enemy ships from afar. Moreover, they yield information a lot quicker than ships with lower emissions.

In fact, the game makes use of balances between emissions and other statistics to balance devices that have the same RP costs against each other. For example, there are main engines that are powerful, yet produce a lot of exhaust gases which make a ship a lot easier to detect when it is moving.

Anyway, returning to the matter of emissions and their impact on stealth, there is a nuance with emissions; if high-emission devices on a ship is not in use (or is disabled), they will not add to the total emissions of the ship. Therefore, a space-ship that is not moving and not firing would be difficult to detect, assuming that it is hiding behind some obstacle to prevent visual detection.

Speaking of visual detection, ships can only detect each other if there are clear lines of sight that they can draw between them, and if they are not too far away, e.g. a few dozen average-size capital ships in length. This makes objects like asteroids somewhat useful, though sensors can detect ships hiding behind obstacles anyway if they are close enough.

As an alternative to sitting still, a ship can resort to lower-emission secondary engines to move about, though this makes the ship slow.

In addition, a ship can have cloaking devices; the canon behind these devices in Nexus: The Jupiter Incident can be quite interesting, by the way, though they would not be elaborated of course, for fear of spoilers. Anyway, cloaked ships have to drop shields, among many other devices, including sensors, and move very slowly, but cannot be detected unless another unaware ship gets right next to it. Otherwise, a cloaked ship can approach an enemy ship without the other realizing it.

On the other hand, powering up systems after cloaking can take too long; this reduces the utility of cloaking.

The space-ships are the stars of the game, so the kinds of space-ships that the player would encounter and the differences would have to be mentioned here.

They are broadly categorized according to their sizes, which are "small", "medium" and "large". Small ships like Destroyers and other escort ships can only mount devices that have been categorized as small, whereas large ships like Battleships and Support Ships (which are akin to carriers) generally can only support large devices. Medium-sized ships, e.g. corvettes, cruisers and frigates, are a bit more versatile, in that they may have device slots of differing sizes or even slots that can support devices of any size.

It is their sizes and device slot layouts that make these ships different from each other. Certain devices can only be of certain sizes, which in turn give ships the potential to have different roles in battle. This review would go into describing the various named ships in the game, but this may well be spoiler territory.

In most missions in the single-player campaign and matches in multiplayer, the player would be controlling a handful of ships. To succeed in battle, the player has to maneuver these ships into advantageous positions relative to enemy ships, e.g. having the broadsides of enemy ships completely exposed to the broadsides of battleships (which have most of their weaponry lining its broadsides), or having one ship draw some fire and thus bait enemy ships to break out of coherence with its compatriots.

This is gameplay that is to be expected from managing a flotilla of warships, but Nexus: The Jupiter Incident has added an extra and substantial feature to the gameplay with the mechanism of siege lasers.

There are ships in the game that are difficult to damage, largely due to having thick shields and many hitpoints, among other defences. Such targets tend to be large and ponderous, making them easy to hit but as mentioned, difficult to decisively harm. Therefore, the game offers the player the option of firing siege lasers, which are powerful beam weapons that only battleships can mount.

To fire the siege laser cannon on a battleship, the player must link at least two ships to a battleship, and all ships must contribute most of their energy to the charging of the cannon, which also happens to be astonishingly long-ranged. This means that the player can form the formation from a long way away from a target, such that said target and its allies may not have enough time to respond. On the other hand, the ships that are trying to fire the siege laser have to spend time getting into formation, which includes having them perfectly parallel with each other.

When the siege laser cannon can be successfully fired, the player is likely to appreciate its effects: it reaches the target instantaneously, bypasses shields completely and does substantial hull damage. More ships in the formation (up to five can be linked together) means faster firing rates. However, the formation can be broken up by firing on the ships that are contributing energy to the battleship, or otherwise forcing them out of formation; even the slightest disruption in positioning can break the link.

There are dangerous things in space other than warships, but these are story-centric entities, so they would not be described much. It should suffice to say that these things would be quite a surprise to deal with the first time around, and that they contribute a lot to the excitement of the story.

As mentioned earlier, space objects like asteroids do nothing much other than pose obstacles to space-ships. However, other objects in space have more meaningful consequences on gameplay and, perhaps more entertainingly, better highlight the graphics of the game.

Wormholes are among the most prominent of these other objects in space. As befitting objects that are akin to black-holes, they are very ominous-looking; dark swirls in space that distort light are generally uneasy to look at. More importantly, getting ships near these has terrible consequences; they can get sucked in. The heavier and bigger the ship is, the more likely it is to get pulled in. Moreover, incoming fire that is directed at a ship that is close to a wormhole will have their paths distorted.

In-game, this can be used by smaller ships against bigger ships, though there is always the risk of being sucked into the wormhole. Furthermore, smaller ships have to sacrifice some of their mobility to fight the influence of the space anomaly.

Once the player has familiarized himself/herself with the works and quirks of the controls, gameplay fundamentals and the traits of the single-player campaign, he/she may well want to continue forth with the story of Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. However, he/she may find that it has a few stumbling points, which mainly concern its technical soundness.

One of the most glaring of these is that the developers have not thought of all possible decisions that a player would take during a mission. For example, the player will come across an ominous-looking ship during the campaign, but it is somewhat inert when first encountered; the player may decide that it should be pre-emptively attacked.

If the player somewhat damaged this ship, he/she would be delighted to know that this will have consequences on the difficulty of later missions; these will not be described in detail as it constitutes spoilers. However, if the player returns to this mission to damage the ship some more, he/she will discover that it causes a crash in a later mission. It will take some trial-and-error if the player wants to troubleshoot this himself/herself, though reading up on third-party information would reveal that this crash is due to A.I. scripting that rigidly requires that some devices on said ship to be operational.

(It has to be noted here that the game-makers had expected that the player would leave said ship well alone during that mission, by the way. However, this also means that they had not expected that players would play in such a way as to break the game.)

There are other bugs in the scripting of the missions in the campaign, though they are thankfully more random than and not as certain as this one.

In any case, the story of the campaign can be rather gripping; it raises questions about what lies in wait for humanity in the final frontier as well as the heights (or depths) that artificial intelligences can reach. Of course, it is all ultimately fiction, but as far as sci-fi space-based fiction goes, that of this game is at the very least competently entertaining.

The voice-acting in this game appears to be mainly reserved for the single-player campaign; ships have voiced-over responses from seemingly the same person when they are given orders, so the player should not expect much in the way of voice-overs during actual gameplay outside of story-centric moments.

Where there is voice-acting for human characters, they are delivered in tones that are appropriate to the current situation. Some of the accents can seem less than authentic, but there is no loss in the quality of the aforementioned tones anyway, which is fortunate.

In addition, there is some amusing banter between some of the characters, especially Cromwell and a certain other character that is more familiar with aliens than with humans. However, perhaps the star of the story is a character that is not Cromwell, but one that is introduced early in the story and that serves to portray the uncertainty and unease that humans would have with sentient beings that are not naturally conceived but re instead created with a specific but mysterious purpose.

Unfortunately, the voice-acting for the aliens can seem atrocious compared to that for the humans. The first (somewhat) friendly alien race that the player encounters can be off-putting, what with their very dreadfully drawling whines. The first hostile alien race is comically hoarse and apparently has a penchant for long-winded titles (which make them even more difficult to appreciate). There are a few more alien races other than these, but they are either not much better or are not even voiced-over at all.

The story campaign would not be elaborated any further, for fear of spoilers. However, it should suffice to say that it has a mixture of story-centric challenges and secondary diversions that would be pleasant for most players.

As a 2005 computer game, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident would seem surprisingly pretty for a game of its time. Its settings do contribute to this impression, or at least the ease of designing graphics for the game. After all, space-ships are not exactly objects that are expected to have a lot of variety in their motions, so this may have reduced the load on the game-makers. On the other hand, the designers were not so lazy as to make the ships out to be listless hulks; many ships have moving parts, not least of which are the turrets that bear their weapons.

However, squadron units can appear to lack enough animations to look convincing as space-craft that are supposed to be more nimble than their much larger motherships. Having the camera zoom in on them would reveal that their models are actually quite static, and that the projectiles that they fire are created slightly ahead of their models instead of convincingly originating from within the barrels of their guns.

Although space-craft in this game may not have much in the way of animations, they do have plenty of impressive geometries and textures, which give them the character that they need that their animations could not. They also help to differentiate between ships of different categories and races. For example, the smaller ships tend to be sleeker than the bulkier capital ships, which make them easily recognizable. Another example is that human ships have more familiar surfaces of metal quality, whereas alien ones have more organic appearances.

Just as impressive, if not more, are the particle effects for their weapons and shields. Shields look a lot like bubbles that encase ships, which may seem a bit visually odd for players who are more used to sci-fi shields that appear insubstantial. However, their graphical appeal would become apparent when hostile fire hits shields; shields flash vibrantly when hit, whereas enemy fire that gets through the shields, especially anti-device weaponry, appear significantly diminished, e.g. energy beams appear narrower when they pass through shields.

However, the most appealing aspect of the graphics is the designs for space itself. The skyboxes for the maps in the game were perhaps the prettiest to be seen in games with settings in space during its time. There are constellations in the skyboxes, distant nebulae and the faint light of faraway stars. The designers rarely resort to taking advantage of the fact that space is mostly void, which would be a pleasant reassurance to players who scoff at lazy game designers.

Anomalies such as the wormhole that has been mentioned earlier make space even more visually interesting. The culmination of these graphical designs can be seen in the finale of the single-player campaign, of which there would be no more elaboration beyond stating that the player's impression of sci-fi notions about time and space would be quite enriched from the experience.

The void of space is not exactly conducive to the propagation of sound, but any game would have been quite dull if it lacks sound designs, even if the settings would make for a very good excuse to have everything silent and subdued. Anyway, almost every occurrence in the game has associated sound effects, such as the whines and discharges of energy-based weaponry. The blaring of the main engines of ships is also believable, which is good as the player will be listening to it a lot.

Perhaps the most impressive of sound effects are those for anomalies. Although there are no real-world audio recordings for spatial anomalies such as black holes, the sounds that have been designed for them are still effective enough to give the player some hints on what to expect from them. For example, deep whooshing noises accompany the swirling of black holes, thus ensuring that the player would at the least find said black hole to be ominous.

The musical designs for the game are satisfactorily competent, though they may seem somewhat typical even back in 2005. Much of the music is orchestral in nature, which include serene or slightly foreboding symphonies for quiet moments during missions to exciting and heart-racing ones when the action heats up. The music is a joy to listen to, but only a few would be remarkable enough for people to remember as the years go by. (One of these is the track that plays during combat, though this one appears to play for just about every occasion involving combat.)

It should be apparent now that Nexus: The Jupiter Incident is a very sophisticated game. Unfortunately, its sophistication may have deterred people from playing the game during its time, back in 2005; there were complaints that there were few people online during its time, which may be an indicator that the game had few players, or at least few players that are willing to participate in online matches. Furthermore, that there were complaints that the proprietary servers that help players find matches over the Internet are not always reliable may have compounded the problem.

The multiplayer portion of this game also does not have many modes to offer. There are the usual free-for-alls, in which players control one or a few ships (depending on the match settings) and go against each other in a deathmatch. Then, there is team deathmatch, which is just a bit more organized. There are several options for victory conditions, such as number of kills or being the last surviving player, but nothing remarkable.

Perhaps one of the key differences in gameplay between the single-player campaign and multiplayer is that there are no variants to any one type of device. For example, in the single-player campaign, there are several grades for the anti-shield weapon type that is known as the Energy Shell. In multiplayer, there is only one, which is simply named "Energy Shell". This causes multiplayer to have somewhat reduced sophistication compared to the single-player campaign, but it does streamline decision-making when players kit out their ships for matches.

Another important difference is that players gain access to ships from other races in multiplayer. The differences among them are not remarkably exciting however; most of their ships are technically the same, when they do have ships of the same category. Missing ship types is a tool that is used to differentiate the races; for example, the Noah have all ship types, whereas the Gorg have only three major ship types, lacking frigates and support ships. Lack of certain weapon types is also another tool used to differentiate them.

However, sometimes, these tools of differentiation clash with each other to make certain ships from certain races very difficult to appreciate. For example, in the launch version of the game, one of the Raptor ships has slots for heavy weapons, but the Raptors lack heavy weaponry.

Where there are unique designs, they lead to imbalances in multiplayer. The most significance instance of this is one particularly powerful missile launcher that is unique to the Vardrags and their massive but slow ships. The missiles fired from this weapon are difficult to shoot down, and can inflict tremendous damage, more so than any other kind of missiles.

Another, even more disappointing example of this flaw is the inclusion of the believable but weak human-made ships that were seen in the first few missions of the story campaign in the multiplayer mode. They are very terribly outclassed by any other ship, perhaps making even the most apologetic of the fans of this game wonder why they were even in multiplayer in the first place.

The limitations of some game mechanisms also made one race in multiplayer quite difficult to use. The Ghosts make extensive use of cloaking, but as mentioned earlier, cloaking has a lot of disadvantages that reduces its utility as an ambushing tool.

Alternatively, the player can play skirmish games, but as mentioned earlier, beating the A.I. can seem a bit too methodical. Although the A.I. is not ham-strung by rigid scripting as seen in the single-player story campaign, the A.I. is still mainly reactionary in behaviour and can be defeated with carefully conservative strategies.

In conclusion, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident is a very bold offering from a bold but relatively low-profile game developer. Its single-player campaign mode is quite competently designed and is sophisticated, but it has many minor flaws such that it is difficult not to have the impression that it is not well thought-out. Moreover, the multiplayer has some balance issues that arose from the game-makers' decision to throw every ship in the single-player campaign in. It should suffice to say that this game's appeal lies in its story and the opportunity to play a space-based game with full six-axis physics, both of which it delivers very well.