You can glide across the ground, fly through the air, and carry three types of weaponry into battle. You’re allowed to fully customize every aspect of your human character, your mech, and the weaponry you carry into battle, but what should’ve inspired fond memories of games like Virtual-On, MechWarrior, or even Titanfall mostly brings back painful memories of Bioware’s Anthem. Nothing would’ve been as effective at muting the narrative problems than the core gameplay being stellar, and sadly, it isn’t. Underwhelming characters and dialogue can be generally ignored but not when there’s such an overwhelming abundance of both at all times. It also doesn’t help matters that, once you’ve fully grasped what’s going on in Daemon X Machina, the story settles into a mediocre merry-go-round of stock anime characters blathering on about their duty, internal politics, and long-standing grudges between missions-drama that’s impossible to care about since most of these characters will appear for one stage, then disappear for the next two or three hours of gameplay. And if you’re still trying to figure out which button equips weapons to different arms while someone is explaining how mercenary factions operate, you’re entirely out of luck. The problem is entirely in the execution, as the bulk of Daemon X Machina’s plot has to be gleaned from the motormouth CPU pilots who fight alongside you in the early missions.
The game doesn’t come close to rising to the level of Neon Genesis Evangelion, but anime-style mech stories have rarely, if ever, needed more than this to make an impression. A few human survivors, though, developed special powers, allowing them to pilot mechs whose sole job it is to quell the AI rebellion.
Aside from that dog, the next inkling you get that something is off about the game is the sheer fact that you’re thrown into a far-future world where cartoonishly gruff mercenaries spout terms and references to in-universe events and conflicts before you have even the slightest clue of who you are, and what exactly has happened to the world.Įventually, enough breadcrumbs are dropped during in-game dialogue for you to piece things together, and an early cutscene does show that part of the moon broke off and slammed into the Earth, triggering some sort of extinction-level event that had the secondary effect of turning our planet’s artificial intelligence robots against us. This is a game with a social space that has a poor sense of being social.ĭaemon X Machina is a mech game where all that’s cool about flying a giant world-saving robot has been executed in the most leaden, user-unfriendly, nonsensical manner possible. The dog will follow you around, but there’s no way to pet it, and no way to interact with any other being unless they send you an email or you start a mission. Once you get to control Daemon X Machina’s customizable human character-who all but vanishes into the background after you’ve created it-you’ll find a pooch standing by one of the kiosks in the mech garage where you start missions and perform upgrades.
In retrospect, the dog should’ve been the first clue.
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