Daemon X Machina Review

Daemon X Machina was developed by First Studio and was published by Marvelous Games. This title is now available on PC following the Switch release back in September 2019.

The story here is a rather generic kinda superhero-esque story and I really liked it. There is a major catastrophe that hits the planet, this leaves a strange energy that turns normal civilians such as your character, into a superhero with many abilities that let you kill things in great ways. This energy also has an effect on things around you and before too long, artificial intelligence is affected by this wonderful energy, and you may wonder, “How will this great energy effect robots?” Well… It turns them into bloodthirsty robots that want to kill all life on the planet.

This is where you essentially breathe life into your character, using the creation suite you must now create your unknown hero. Here you have the option to choose colours, styles and the like, although I wasn’t too impressed with the options as for 2020 standards. This felt lackluster in comparison to some recent games with created heroes.

As mentioned before there are other civilians that have turned into superheroes such as yourself. The game does quite a good job of introducing us to them and bringing them into the overarching story. I found this to be quite underwhelming though, as there are quite a few different characters, but if you asked me for the name of each character there is only a handful that I would actually be able to point out.

This game is kind of a mix of an RPG and a mech ‘em up hack and slash. The combat here is fun but it can be very overwhelming, there are so many different keys for each weapon and a lot to work out. The game does have a rather short tutorial mission, however, I still found myself struggling from time to time forgetting which key does what. When you’re actually in the mech and killing robots, this isn’t too bad as the game isn’t too difficult and has aim assist for when you can’t quite aim at those pesky robots that are in cover.

The HUD in this game is definitely not one of the game’s strong points as some of the game’s most important information can be lost in a visual maze that they call a HUD. Daemon X Machina has around 20 different meters at one time, covering your health, ammo, armour and more and it’s just too much for a newcomer to this style of game to handle. After a few hours it does get better, but even when I play it now I find myself forgetting which bar does what.

So the general layout of the game goes like this; you accept a mission, you watch a few cutscenes, complete the mission which usually doesn’t take very long and then you go straight onto the next mission and repeat the process. While this doesn’t stray far from how most games deal with their structure, I couldn’t help but feel underwhelmed with how the game felt to play and how the missions were basically the same but in different areas.

Okay let’s talk about how Daemon X Machina handles on PC so the minimum requirements aren’t bad and you don’t need the highest-end GPU or a £300 CPU to play this game, the game runs fine on my GTX 980 and my Ryzen 2700X, with these specs I was hitting well above 60 fps. This is the huge positive that came out of this re-release on PC as when this game was released on the Switch it was locked to 30 fps, and although at the time this was alright, it hadn’t been released on other platforms, playing this title on PC now feels like the Switch version was held back a lot.