All Style, No Substance
From the offset, Nitro Gen Omega looks a stylish game, being a fan of turn-based RPG’s I could not wait to get into it, however I ended up feeling ultimately bored and not invested in it’s world.
To begin with you assemble a cast of four pilots all with varying and random features such as their clothes, skin colour and face, you can lock pilots that your happy while re-rolling those you don’t particularly like the look of. Names are also assigned randomly, there is a character creator which is actually really good but to use this you must select it as an option before starting the game, it is also odd that it is not part of the interface when you select your cast to start the game with, once you start picking your pilots you can then pick the characters you created giving you full freedom on your team.
The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where humans lost against artificial intelligence, the mercenary pilots that you control explore the world completing missions, contracts whilst battling mech on mech battles in turn-based gameplay.
Quickly you take control of an airship exploring the post-apocalyptic world where you can land in settlements and fly to areas where battles will take place, the overworld is bland and while for the most part you will be flying from point to point it isn’t very engaging, when you are in a settlement it gives a menu where you can go to various shops or events within that settlement, this is not bad game design and many other games adopt this well and the stylized look of the game helps it, unfortunately it is where everything else in the game falls flat.
As mentioned Nitro Gen Omega is a turn-based RPG where you battle your mech against other mech within a battle area. What I do love is the combat animations, just not the combat itself sadly. The animations are great and well done but the combat was a tad confusing for me, it was only until it came to beating several mech within the same fight that I understood the mechanics a little bit more but the game for me did not explain it well to begin with. There are four segments on a battle field and whilst your mech sits in one of them your opponent sits in another. The bottom of the screen shows the turn order, in order for your turns to play out you initiate your orders to each pilot and then play them out by executing the resolution phase, this shows your mech move into the zone and each character will play in sequence their round of attacks with the enemy also doing their attack dependant on where they are on the turn order. Whilst the animations are fantastic they do end up feeling old because you will see the same animations over and over again, I get it is a turn based RPG so this kind of thing is standard, however there is not enough variety in the attacks for every battle feeling different and tactical enough.
Finishing the battle and a few cutscenes later I obtained an activity token, said token allowed me to “bond” with one of my other crew members. This allows you to boost morale and make your team feel better about themselves and make you perform better in battle, this for me really killed the rest of the anticipation I had for Nitro Gen Omega. I am all for a great character building system implemented into a game but as I’ve created four characters out of nothing and barely know anything about them, why would I care about bonding them with each other other than the sake of they will do better in battle. Also if your mech takes too much damage you will lose a crew member, the game will tell you “they didn’t make it” and while you replace them with another member your characters will never acknowledge this as if nothing ever happened, I think any good RPG has a bond system where you can improve relations between members but when your characters have no personality at all it does not make it engaging at all, also having a token to be able to bond makes no logical sense and a more welcome idea would be to just allow one bond per day or per mission.
While there are a few systems to engage with the world is really dull and boring, you fly around the map to find things to do with but there is really nothing there and it feels so barren and empty. There are no side activities or at least I have come across yet, the game has you follow a path, go to this point, fight a mech and go back to base and engage with your crew before venturing out again once more. As you fly around the ship loses fuel so you will need to refuel at gas station which costs marbles, everything in the game uses this currency so if you need to buy new parts for your ship you will need plenty of this currency also. The only other saving grace with Nitro Gen Omega is the mechs customization system, you are able to switch out individual body parts which all determine not only how the mech looks but which actions it can do, it is quite a bit more in depth compared to the rest of the game and the sound and music of the game is also pretty good but when everything else feels less interesting then the other gameplay systems and stylized visuals of the game fall flat which is a shame as Nitro Gen Omega could have been much better than it actually is.
A PlayStation 5 Review Code was provided by DESTINYbit
