Daemon X Machina (2019)

Playtime: 31 minutes (3 missions)

Played: 2025

Intro

This is a third-person shooter/shmup in which you pilot a big flying robot, sit through endless menu's, shoot enemies for 5 minutes and repeat the loop.

The Good

n/a

The Bad

• Endless menu's that are keyboard operated and have you guessing how to proceed.
• Awful story and even worse dialogues. I literally turned off voice sound.
• You constantly have to hammer Tab to skip each subsequent cutscene.
• Extremely dated graphics and awful use of visual effects outside gameplay.
• Poor feedback with puny sounds
• Sleeping-inducing gameplay. I almost Alt+F4ed during the third mission. Zzzz.
• Super-short missions so you have to sit through all those menu's again.
• Vague terms that aren't explained.

Conclusion

I would rather replay Fury³, Terminal Velocity or some other 30 year old shooter than suffer through this dreadful trash.

There is a lot happening in Daemon X Machina, but the unfortunate characteristic of this game is that very little matters.

• There's the post-apocalyptic setting, but it's vaguely defined without any mythology behind it.
• There are lots of cutscenes involving lots of characters talking in cringy anime-style dialogue, but the narrative doesn't seem to go anywhere.
• You can customize your giant robot by swapping out body parts that change stats, but it's unclear what you're supposed to be optimizing for.
• There are a large number of missions, but they all feel derived from the same template.
• Combat does not evolve in any meaningful way. You start with enemies that die quickly, then graduate to various levels of bullet sponges.
• You can play in your human form (as an 'Outer'), but I can't see a single advantage in taking this approach. The game will instead force you to do this for certain missions.

I'm not even getting into the technical problems here: the pointlessly large number of weapons/parts, the ineffective lock-on system in combat, the weird skill-tree system, and more.

At the end of all this, you have a game that feels confused and aimless. 'Play as a giant robot and fight other giant robots' is a fun premise, but once the shallow appeal of it wears out, you're left with a mostly empty game.

I played through the single-player campaign and made it to Rank C. I plan to abandon the game at this point and move on. It was fun while it lasted.

Well this was a disappointment

I wasn't really expecting that much, I was drawn in by the stylish presentation in terms of the main menu and UI, and I like the concept of mech action fulfillment. I even felt like it had similar systems to EDF 4.1.

Boy could I not be more wrong, it's actually so mechanically dull and formulaic that every single mission actually became more irritating in how it drops the ball. It's kinesthetically bare, with actions that don't feel powerful to hit and enemy attacks that feel like chunks to your own tankish armor. The enemy design is so boring and easy to work with that it's almost devoid of any challenge. That extends to the boss design too, with some weak point areas that are a sleepfest to just exploit. Even the "dogfights", where I was hoping would at least be the most interesting part, turned out to be the least interesting. The AI for their combat is straight up trash, easy to take down, and I felt not a single bit of compelling fun with the encounters against them.

The story and characters are forgettable too, featuring stand-in one note trope personalities, and it's so overbearingly anime in all the worst ways that statement could imply. The narrative is poorly paced and not so interesting to behold, turning out to be as simple as it let on at the start.

I don't want to play any more of it, it's just boring. (4/10)