Daemon X Machina was announced early into the original Nintendo Switch’s life cycle, and was exciting for Switch owners to get a taste of a portable Armored Core experience. I liked the original game, even if it missed the mark in a couple of ways, but that was after playing it on PC. It was an uneven, but fun, mecha experience that was decent to play on Nintendo’s portable. After the void of Armored Core was filled by FromSoftware themselves, Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion was in a much different spot.
Your create-a-character is a member of a race of humanoids called The Outers, who crash lands on the Blue Planet when making his escape from a space station called The Garden. Outers and humans have been stuck in a conflict over this planet for ages, and your character joins a human resistance called The Reclaimers to get back at The Garden. Along the way, you’ll need to fight The Neun, an organization of Outers in The Garden leading the fight against humanity.
I was initially disappointed at the scale shift from large, real robots to mecha exoskeletons. I’ve never really been drawn to exo-suits in mecha the same way as I have been to shows like Gundam, for example. I do think I understand why they changed focus, and I warmed up quickly to it. This was probably done because of the shift from a mission-based structure to fully explorable open zones. The zones probably wouldn’t feel as large if you explored them with the full-sized Arsenal of the first game. What is truly important is that Arsenal customization is just as in-depth as before.
You can customize your Arsenal’s head, both arms individually, torso, and legs. Equipment all falls between light, medium, and heavy weight classes. You find these either out in the world, as a reward from fallen enemies, by buying them, or by crafting them. Loot drops feel more prevalent than before, making it the best reason to go out and explore every corner of the world. Every piece of gear has different stats, passives, or customizable ability slots. Grinding for gear to make my Arsenal run efficiently, managing my available total memory allocation, and making it all look as cool as possible was, if nothing else, an engaging gameplay loop from start to finish.
It’s also worth mentioning that the original-sized Arsenals aren’t entirely gone, now showing up as a temporary pilotable special you can summon that you unlock later in the story. These are fun to use, but the timing feels a bit unbalanced, and their raw power can kind of melt enemy health. Not like there aren’t a billion ways to design an overpowered Arsenal, making this just another tool in your… well, you know.
If you’re a fan of the original game and are worried about the combat changing too much, you don’t need to be. Game feel and movement is as tight as it was before, but now there are more weapon types and actions you can use in battle. For those who haven’t played the original, you’ll balance ground and air combat by dashing and boosting around. Boosting and dashing will expend a resource called Femto, while dodging and attacking expend your stamina. Each weapon might not have the most complicated combo string, but this is made up for by Arsenal customization and movement. My personal build involved two weapons to dual-wield at a moment’s notice, a heavy gun, a smaller gun, and a shoulder device to replenish health on occasion. I kept all my armor light or medium rate to dash around quickly.
There are a lot of button combinations to memorize, but I always appreciate this in a mecha game. It can be a bit convoluted to understand, and enemies hit hard and move fast, but that kind of pressure had me loving encounters. Mastering the timing on flight, disengaging it when needed, circling enemies, or how to best aim the bazooka to emulate the RX78-2 Gundam by doing trick shots in the air. There’s something exhilarating about how great it is to boost and dash around large numbers of enemies, and I just couldn’t get enough of it. I love an action game where every button on my controller gets used. Being able to emulate the complicated layout of machinery while still making the game itself feel fun is no easy feat. The moment-to-moment gameplay has been improved a lot over the original in my opinion, and that’s absolutely what you want the devs to focus on for a game like this.
Obtaining new skills and abilities comes from the Fusion system, where you can take Factors from defeated Immortals and fuse them into your body to unlock new skills. These skills can be weapon actions (multiple for each of the ten weapon types), general actions (unique skills for your arsenal, like a grappling hook), or passive buffs and debuffs. The only reason why you wouldn’t want to use these skills is that they can often result in a physical mutation to a part of your body. In my experience, this changed my eyes, marked my character’s skin, or had him develop odd growths on his back like a pair of wings.
I really like this conceptually, with there being a cost for extra power and an expanded moveset. The physical mutations grow out of control rather quickly, making it so your character can’t even wear their normal outfit anymore. You spend most of the actual game in your Arsenal, but there are plenty of story cutscenes where you’re out of it and can look really silly. You can spend a lot of money (which scales depending on how many times you’ve used Fusion) to revert your appearance, but that also comes with taking away all your unlocked skills. I just kind of accepted that my guy looked a little weird, not wanting to give up how fun Fusion made the gameplay. I just really wish there had been clothing options for mutated characters.
Combat itself is great, but exploration doesn’t exactly come together exactly as I was hoping for. There are parts of it that are just incredible, like flying through at fast speeds or finding random encampments of Axiom soldiers to get extra loot. Hel (see what I did there?) I even adored the rare, massive enemies roaming zones. I always found them to be just too strong for me initially, giving me plenty of reasons to try again and again or redesign my build and come back. Enemies are fun to fight here, and it’s always nice to move in these spaces, but the visual variety isn’t too abundant in the environments. This makes sense given that the setting is a war-torn planet, but I do think things look maybe a bit too samey.
There is some variety to where you explore, with sub zones in each of the main three zones, but they kind of blend together. You’ll have fast travel locations, towers, and caves with minor dungeons inside to hunt for more loot. These are a fun diversion, but often look identical to one another. I’m not too mad at the asset re-use, but it did mean that by the end, I felt less and less of a reason to comb every corner of the map. This is a much more ambitious game than the first, but not exactly a AAA big-budget open-world game. There are quirks to how the overworld is laid out that I just found intriguing. Cars and horses dot the map to ride on for travel, but never go as fast as just flying around in your Arsenal. Boosting around uses Femto, but crystals that can restore that meter are all over the map, so it’s not like you’re needing to manage resources too often. Mining deposits can be found all around, but I rarely thought they were worth the mini-game needed.
Like your average AAA open-world title, there’s a bunch of side quests you can pick up at your base that can keep you going out and engaging with the world. You’ll usually just be escorting someone, fighting some Immortals, or talking to NPCs. They’re standard, don’t really break the mold, but are still pretty fun to do. That’s really a representation of the open-world as a whole. This is nothing you haven’t seen before, but the core gameplay is what really brings a spark to all this. Being able to do all of this in a cool robot smooths over a lot, even if it can’t patch up every issue.
The story in a high-octane action game is often an excuse to establish gameplay, but I commend them for buffing this out with a lot of cutscenes. There is a lot of effort put into the story and world-building, but I think it didn’t really hit as much as I would have liked. Interesting ideas such as rising against oppression, overcoming prejudice, and body autonomy are just a couple of ideas that are explored in the plot. They just don’t really go as hard as I would have liked to elevate the plot further than just what it needed to be. I don’t think it ever truly fails, but not much really resonated or stuck with me after I hit the credits. Shonen energy and mecha homage do keep things interesting enough, though.
Playing this on the Nintendo Switch 2 has been interesting to say the least. It’s impressive that a game this fast runs on it at all, but it doesn’t do so perfectly. You aren’t getting a full 4k image, but the resolution is decent at least in both docked and undocked. The bigger problem here is performance, stability, and loading. After the Day 1 patch, performance improved a lot over when I first started playing. It targets 30 frames per second, and hits that often in the overworld with dips and stutters. It was rare, but on occasion, I would see rare battles drop to single frames. The stutters might be harder to ignore for some, but I’m used to playing Switch ports, so I was able to get through it.
This Day 1 patch might have improved performance, but it came with the downside of much longer loading times. When you fast travel to a place in Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion you’ll get an initial loading screen, then load into a room before the doors open to the area you wanted to go to. I imagine ideally this process would be quick, but after the latest patch, it doesn’t really work like that. The loading screen would take about 20 seconds, and then I would be stuck in the room for anywhere between 10-30 seconds. At its absolute worst, this could even take over 30 seconds, and I was never even sure why.
What made this process even more nerve-racking was that fast traveling to or from the first zone of the game, Desert, could randomly softlock the game during the initial loading screen. I wouldn’t be able to do anything until I restarted the game. Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion does have an autosave, but it doesn’t do it often enough that this wouldn’t result in losing progress for certain missions. Until this is fixed, I would recommend just making a manual save before fast traveling in this zone. Besides that, I would even have random instances of hard crashing during missions. Redoing the segment would often fix it, so I never really knew why they were happening.
It’s always difficult to judge games like this pre-release. Games are alive now, being updated and expanded over time. Days before release, I haven’t seen any new updates pushed to my game, but I wouldn’t be surprised if these issues are addressed before long. The crashing, I’m sure, will be handled, but who can say about how the performance and loading are handled long term? I had a good time with the game despite these hitches, but every time I was stuck in the loading room for a long period of time, I felt my immersion in the world and setting drain away.
Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion is a worthy sequel to the original game, but might not be the massive improvement some might have hoped. Despite the parts that didn’t feel fully realized, I definitely felt more invested in this than I did with the original Daemon X Machina. I’m glad the developer tried to mix things up from just making another Armored Core-inspired game, and I think the genre shift works more than it doesn’t, but not everything perfectly clicked together. The core gameplay might not be the most deep, but the customization has a real pull to it that carries a lot of the experience, even with an average open-world and an underwhelming story. It’s just hard to deny the frequent technical issues I experienced with the Nintendo Switch 2 version, so I hope these get sorted at some point in the future. In the meantime, it might be worth playing it on another platform.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch 2
Review copy provided by Marvelous
