Housemarque built Nex Machina with Eugene Jarvis. The source describes the game as a collaboration between the studio and the man behind Robotron: 2084 and Smash TV. Housemarque developed and published it, and it shipped on 20 June 2017 for PlayStation 4 and Windows.
Trailer, via Housemarque Games.
Nex Machina, Robotron, and the Man Who Built Both
Jarvis is credited as the legendary creator of Robotron: 2084 and Smash TV. Those two games are the foundation of the twin-stick shooter, and Nex Machina is what happens when a studio steeped in that tradition builds one alongside the man himself. It is a twin-stick shoot ’em up played from a top-down view. You move through rooms, shoot waves of enemies, and try to save humans before the machines get them. Power-ups and weapon upgrades sit scattered through the levels.
That is the whole pitch, and it is enough. Nex Machina does not want to be a campaign. It wants to be a machine you feed coins.
The Story Is a Joke, and It Knows It
The premise is thin on purpose. Humans have become so dependent on technology that they cannot avert their eyes from portable devices anymore. Around them, machines have reached consciousness and surpassed human intelligence tenfolds. No reasons to be servants now — robots are clearly the superior lifeform. And to make their point, they start eradicating all human life.
Humans have become so dependent on technology that they cannot avert their eyes from portable devices anymore.
Read that again and notice what it is actually about. The reading that the phones, not the robots, are the real target is criticism, not a claim about what the developers intended. Nex Machina takes the oldest arcade setup there is — machines rise up, kill everyone — and aims it at the audience holding a device. It is a joke, and it lands, and then it gets out of the way so you can shoot things.
Saving Humans, Chasing Scores
The humans you rescue are the point of the whole design. They are not set dressing. They are the reason you push one room further than you should, the reason a clean run turns into a greedy one, and the reason you lose. Nex Machina was built with competition in mind, and that single choice — save the people, or save your skin — is where the competition lives.
The game supports single player, multiplayer and co-operative play. The co-op matters more than the feature list suggests. Two players in a top-down arena, both reaching for the same human, both making the same bad decision at the same time, is a different game than the one you play alone.
How Nex Machina Compares
| Nex Machina | Robotron: 2084 | Smash TV | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year | 2017 | Not given | Not given |
| Developer | Housemarque | Not given | Not given |
| Jarvis role | Collaborator | Creator | Creator |
| Perspective | Top-down | Not given | Not given |
The table is honest about what we know and what we do not. What matters is the middle column and the last one. Jarvis built the template twice. Housemarque built the third version in collaboration with him, and the result carries his fingerprints and the studio’s polish at the same time.
The Verdict on Nex Machina
Nex Machina received positive reviews from critics, and the aggregate sits at 9.1 out of 10 across 16 outlets. That number is not a surprise. What is worth saying is that it undersells the thing slightly, because a score cannot describe how a game feels in the hands.
This is Housemarque at its most confident. The studio had already shown it could do this with Resogun and Alienation. Nex Machina is the one where the influences are named out loud and the design gets sharper instead of softer. The rooms are readable. The enemies arrive in patterns you can learn. The humans are always just far enough away to make you hesitate, and hesitation is death.
The weak point is the story, and it is barely a weak point because the story is not trying. A game that opens by blaming your phone for the robot apocalypse has already told you how seriously to take its plot. The arcade structure — rooms, waves, power-ups, upgrades — is not a limitation either. It is the format, and Nex Machina respects the format.
What holds it back from a higher mark is only this: Nex Machina is a machine built for a specific player, and it does not pretend otherwise. If you want a narrative, look elsewhere. If you want the best version of a thing that Jarvis invented and Housemarque perfected, this is it. The co-op is the reason to keep it installed. The scoring is the reason to keep coming back.
Nex Machina earns its number. It is the rare arcade revival that understands the past without drowning in it, and it is the cleanest argument Housemarque ever made for why these games still matter.
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