Nitro Gen Omega PC Review
Summary: Nitro Gen Omega offers novelty with anime cutscenes and high-tempo thrill in between slow strategic turn-based mech battles.
3.5
anime turn-based battler
So, the best cultural touchstone I heard for Nitro Gen Omega is the anime Gurren Lagann – although I think maybe it’s a tad generous. I absolutely loved Gurren Lagann in my late teens, so much that I don’t want to rewatch it because the nostalgia resonates so strongly. By contrast, I felt Nitro Gen Omega was more akin to early high school kids mucking around during school holidays, pretending to play Gurren Lagann. Please don’t let that stop you from checking it out – it starts off charming and novel, and like those high school kids I’m imagining, if you are really invested in the Mech fantasy and the story, you’ll probably be hooked. It didn’t connect with me the way I hoped, but I appreciated what DESTINYbit have aimed for.
From my intro I really hope you have already identified that Nitro Gen Omega is a game about Mechs. It is a turn-based strategic mech battler – DESTINYbit have described the game as a tactical sandbox RPG. I’m not sure the ‘sandbox’ or ‘RPG’ elements lived up to my expectations given I didn’t notice much significance of choice or freedom of player expression besides equipment loadouts and intermittent pseudo-significant random encounter choices. I think I was hoping for something more akin to Into the Breach by Subset Games, or the recently released Demonschool by Necrosoft – or maybe Nitro Gen Omega will evolve with a bit more polish and updates.
You roam an open world in your airship in between turn-based battles or city storefronts, progressing the main quest or growing stronger by accumulating and spending resources gained from completing side-quests. Set in a dystopian and intermittently beautiful coloured ‘open’ world (some hard boundaries that the airship literally bumps against), years after humanity collectively lost a war, presumably against the machines. ‘Rogue’ machines spread across the world, with humanity sheltering in cities built on top of large pillars, fatalistically living a daily routine.
Your team are ‘Fools’, a group of young mercenaries that felt to me more like what hipsters and punks in the 2010’s aspired to represent. Each member of the team is responsible for piloting a different part of your ‘Monki’ mech – think Gunner, Engineer, Driver, Operator. You have the chance to customise your original team of pilots, within limits of course – I spent a lot of time on my first pilot, to good effect; and was disappointed by the randomiser results from the game system since most of them ended up feeling a bit too cookie-cutter.
The art style is one of the games main strengths. If you can spend the time on creating your pilots, you will be rewarded – and the initial presentation of each character is bonkers. I played about half on Steam Deck, which definitely undersells how well each character feels sketched straight out of concept art onto the screen. I wish I knew which art-appreciation words to use to describe how these characters feel like they’re moving and flowing out of the screen whilst also feeling abstract.
Like I wrote above, you are either battling or roaming and resource spending. I enjoyed the art style of the cities, albeit they feel repetitive after the second or third instance, and feel more like a ‘campfire’ store front very quickly as you stock up on supplies (‘fuel’) and customise your mech for greater health, damage output, etc. I reckon about 20% of my time was spent in the overworld, which says more for how long the battles feel.
So, combat… it is turn-based, labelled as ‘rounds’, in two phases. Phase One – you are planning what each of your pilots are doing, assigning different ‘orders’ (think melee or ranged attacks, movement and repositioning skills, healing, revealing an enemy’s actions). The entire timeline of each round/turn is split into multiple segments, and you can choose which action occurs in which segment. The enemies are doing similar, and when Phase Two occurs – ‘Resolution’ – these actions occur as per the locked in timeline, with specific anime style cutscenes playing. At first each battle round will feel like a scene from your usual list of mech-based anime stories. The similarity of each scene wears down this feeling rapidly.
I am conflicted on the battle system. I think I simultaneously appreciate the novelty and strategy, whilst finding it a bit too simple, repetitive and overall ‘not fun’ after 2 or 3 battles. This was exacerbated after the first 3-4 hours for me, because I began to resent how long I was spending in the basic UI and how repetitive it was to be clicking and selecting again and again just to fulfil what I found to be fancy rock-paper-scissors with the added dimension of time. Instead of enjoying the flashy animations for each action I began to view each more critically given the overall ‘sameness’ to each encounter since each scene was replayed more and more often as I used similar combat skills.
Towards the end of the game battles involve multiple enemies with what feel like enormous health pools…I’m not a fan of this method of difficulty, particularly in Nitro Gen Omega – these battles of attrition, as I used similar move patterns again and again, isolating enemies one by one, and having to watch the same scenes again and again through a cumbersome UI… I stopped caring about the game at some point during these battles and was glad for the chance to get away from battle and travel in my airship, or simply leave my Steam Deck on my bedside table and ignore it.
Overall I think Nitro Gen Omega is going to click deeply with a small group of players. Others who dip their toes in will probably enjoy the novelty before bouncing off to something else. If you choose to spend your time here, please consider that this is definitely not Into the Breach meets anime. It does not feel like combat chess (yet), and the similarity of each combat encounter over time slowly erodes the beautiful graphic art style. Keep an eye out, maybe DESTINYbit will introduce a more varied roster of combat scenes or rebalance enemy encounters in a way that deepens strategy.
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