Daemon X Machina is an action game released by Marvelous for Nintendo Switch and PC in 2019. The only difference between the NS and PC release is that on PC the game runs more smoothly, of course. As the game isn't graphically demanding, you will have no problems running this game above 90 fps at all.

You're playing as an avatar (Outer) who is using a highly customisable mech (Arsenal) to accomplish your mission. Since you're practically a mercenary, you will engage in various missions ordered by different consortium nations operating within the Oval Link (a barrier to contain Femto particles (particles that fell to the planet when the moon broke apart during the Moonfall)).

Missions mostly consist of defeating Immortals, but the further you go through the game, the more you'll engage with other mercenaries as different consortium nations have different objectives. Overall the missions are divided into 5 ranks, each rank increasing the difficulty. I felt that at least half of the missions weren't intriguing enough, practically I went several times on the Fandom site to check how many missions I have yet to finish to get access to the higher rank.

The story also isn't really interesting at the beginning and there is barely some story until the last rank. Between some missions, you get several story-related cutscenes which raise the feeling that something is coming, but none of it is presented before you get access to the last rank's missions. Half of the game I wasn't even sure if whatever other mercenaries were talking before and after the mission, was important. One more reason it was hard to understand the story, especially at the beginning, is because of how many mercenaries you meet, not realising that almost none of them has a major impact on the story.

The best part of this game is the combat (gameplay) and the mech customisation options. On the battlefield, you can bring up to 4 different weapons (I recommend equipping all slots since in boss fights you'll probably end up without ammo near the end), a shoulder weapon and an auxiliary. There are also decals which further increase the customisation options but keeping in mind that you'll watch the back of your Arsenal, I see no use of them.

The shop is used to buy and sell equipment, mostly to sell them since the buy option isn't used as much as in other games. The only thing you can buy is processors, the only thing you can't loot from defeated AIs and other mercenaries's Arsenals (mechs). You can also craft better weapons, which require the base weapon and a material used to augment it.
Most of the earned currency in the game (you're a mercenary, so, you're paid after every mission) you're gonna use it to buy skills from the Lab section found in the main hub, which according to the description are either for you Outer or Arsenal.

I forgot to mention that you also can leave your Arsenal (that's why there are two different skill sections) when it's heavily damaged. You are not as powerful as if you were in your Arsenal, but some missions will demand you not to use your Arsenal, but to engage on foot.

All in all a game that concentrates more on the gameplay than on the story itself. To sum up, the game is decent, but the quality isn't still there yet to call this game great.

there's no reason to play this now that armored core 6 has released and is getting updated.

I shouldn't have to play something for 50 hours in order for it to get slightly better. The gameplay is extremely shallow and it has no reason to be on pc since there's no added mechanics to benefit the 200 fps cap.

The gameplay looks nothing like the trailers, navigating the mech feels awful, Boring map design, and the story and dialogue is cringeworthy.

Not sure why this got so many good reviews when it came out it doesn't scratch the armored core itch. Max I could give this is 2 stars, it isn't fun at all.

It starts out quite interesting and fun but quickly devolves into tedium when every mission becomes essentially the same thing.

The robot customizing looks like it has some depth but really just equip the things that make number go up and you'll beat every mission no problem. The game presents various options for combat but lacks any real depth as even the games toughest enemies that come at you in their own mechs can be beaten by just shooting them with rifles and spamming homing rockets. In some cases I didn't even have to move to kill the boss enemies even in the games final few missions. Speaking of the final few missions, without spoiling anything, are copy pasted FOUR times and result in a feeling of tedium rather than an exciting climax

The cast of characters is also far too big and none of them are fleshed out particularly well so the game will try to do big emotional moments with certain people but you'll be sat there going "who was that?" rather than engaging with the events on screen.

Unless you got it for free from Epic Game Store when it was available I suggest looking elsewhere for your mecha fix

This game grabbed me immediately upon playing the demo, and I hawked sales for six months before I gratefully bought the hard copy for half price on eBay.

My momentum with this game didn’t last long. The missions start repetitive, simple, slow, and boring. They don’t mix up the variety of enemy or mission types at first, and it’s easy to sail through the opening hours of the game with few armor or weapon upgrades/unlocks to show for it. The whole allure of the game to me was the radically deep customization options and mastery of the game’s systems, and it wasn’t giving me enough of that to keep coming back.

As I muscled through, I was rewarded. The mission variety improves, and they eventually get somewhat challenging, at least in parts. A big way to improve the difficulty and rewards is to have the player engage more enemy mechs (Arsenals) instead of lesser enemies. There are whole chapters of the game seemingly committed to just that, which was a nice relief. Additionally, I revisited the armor and weapon development menu ten hours in and found it well worth diving into, as opposed to the other times I had checked it too early in the game.

So many of my qualms got addressed with a little patience. Other things, not so much. The writing is among the worst in any game I’ve played. Both the general story and the individual dialogue lines are all written like a really bad anime. It’s hard to get invested because the story is gibberish, and the characters are almost entirely insufferable. They are horribly overwritten, with people routinely saying things only anime characters would ever say or think they could get away with.

The pacing of the game is dire. Every single mission is bookended by either cutscenes, dialogue sections, or both. Missions are frequently voiced over by more dialogue, and interrupted still more by cutscenes and dialogue reads mid-level. I’m pretty sure some if not all missions are wall to wall dialogue, hardly if ever giving you a chance to appreciate the sound effects and music without talking. It’s as talky as an MGS title, but not nearly as interesting, and the game probably takes as long per mission as it does for each accompanying cutscene and dialogue break. I’m not making this up. I had half a mind to skip it all, but I was invested enough that I did want to find out what the heck is happening in this game. It’s about as considered as what I was writing in middle school, so I was not expecting to be blown away at time of this writing.

Controls are good and fully customizable. Gameplay is good when it’s good. Graphics are a nice lightly cel shaded style but technically developed as well. I think the visual style is VERY cool. Customization is deep and confusing. Maybe impenetrable might be a better word.

The presentation as a whole is good, with tons of HUD elements and gauges to dress everything up, nice effects and particle stuff to catch the eye. It looks good and feels good to fly and zip around and shoot stuff up. The guns suffer from feeling a bit weak, shooting a bit slow, and not locking on from enough distance. I realize these are things that can be balanced and tweaked, but even when optimizing for these things, you still feel sort of impotent sometimes. I thought maybe that would get better as I keep bumping up my kit, but it never truly does.

The story is absolute hogwash, but it’s delivered with such conviction. The stakes get more and more dire as the game goes on, and by the end it’s utter catastrophe. But I never feel threatened or intimidated by any enemy or mission. (Until the final boss, woof.) All the emotion and drama is confined to text messages, dialogue exchanges, and cutscenes.

So far I’ve only spent one short paragraph praising the game. Of note, the presentation is really terrific. PMCs and characters send you chat messages between missions, with a smart and simple interface that even includes ellipses of the next message being “composed” before you click A to show the next one. The main hub area is a hangar bustling with screens, activities, your unlocked weapons, and dominated by your giant Arsenal.

The hangar music, which extends to the menus around the main hub like your armor and weapon customization, is extremely good and catchy. It fits the mood perfectly. The soundtrack is pretty terrific, although it occasionally veers into some screamo and metal territory that doesn’t always work for me. But a lot of it is just great stuff.

I’m really impressed by the graphics. I mentioned them earlier but they strike a nice balance between artistic and technical. Honestly I’ve compared them before to Breath of the Wild. I think there are some aesthetic similarities there, but BOTW stretches its visuals much further by constructing environments that are vastly larger and full of things to do and look at. DXM’s environments are bleak on purpose, but they’re largely barren, devoid of anything to look at. Sometimes you get some city blocks or a bombed out sports stadium; other times you get vast empty desert scapes, big military bases, or subterranean tunnel networks.

The cutscenes are surprisingly dynamic and well directed. They use a lot of flash camera moves and effects. They feel high quality.

I love how they portray the inside of the cockpits. The empty blackness with floating holographic screens is super cool.

It took me multiple years of playing on and off to beat this game. I finally had to look up how to beat the last boss, which was wiping the floor with me before that. I remain a bit flummoxed by this game.

Strip away the story and writing and when you’re just PLAYING it, it feels like one step forward and one step backward everywhere. Controls well and combat seems like it should be fun, but it’s dull a lot of the time with brilliance sprinkled in here and there. My Arsenal never felt incredibly lethal despite seldom meeting a challenging opponent; I would rather have had a more capable mech and tougher enemies than playing a game that always felt like one of the training wheels was still on.

I was looking forward to deep diving the customization, but a lot of it was too much fussing and not enough impact. Plus, aggregating parts and weapons took much longer than I would’ve wanted to hold my interest. I basically just subtly tweaked my mech to keep it well rounded every time I obtained new kit. Oftentimes I’d unlock a part or a weapon and never use it. I just wasn’t hooked like I wanted to be.

That’s what it really boils down to. I wanted to like this game, and I overall did…barely. It just could have and should have been so much better.

…which is EXACTLY why I’m stoked for Armored Core 6. BRING IT.

If I was ever going to play a mech game, I'm not playing the one by the Souls team, I'm playing the one by the Harvest Moon team!

Mechs in general don't really do much for me, so I was wary that the game might be unapproachable and overcomplicated, but I think this game strikes a pretty good balance for a “casual+” like me. There's also decent mission and landscape variety, and the early missions are fairly short and forgiving. I think using the trigger buttons was a smart way to design the combat of this game, however playing this in handheld mode or with joycons does not feel great. This game feels like it was designed to be sat in front of a screen with a pro controller or with the game’s custom handheld peripheral… not really designed for the vanilla Switch experience.

While this game is generally adequate all around, it struggles to maintain my interest too much or pull me back in after I set it down. The story doesn't have much intrigue. It introduces a ton of characters, so that you can later unlock them as teammates, but as a result you don't really feel connected to any of them. it’s hard to tell what the actual stakes are, and the enemies are undefined AIs without a clear motivation. There are some named enemies but the game has you destroy them at the end of each mission, so it does not feel personal. The progression is also slow and incremental, I don’t feel much different after an hour or two of playing. Overall it’s somewhat disappointing as a RPGish experience, but I’m ok with it being the type of game I can passively absorb over a long period of time, without needing to focus on. This isn’t a game I feel a need to finish or see everything, I can just chip away at if I ever want to jump back into a mech suit.

cool game.

fun gameplay loop, awesome music, good voice acting with cool characters, neat presentation, and the customization really rounds things out nicely.

obviously its a little jank and the boss fights are queeestionable but its all good fun and i haven't played a ton else like this on switch. higher budget for cutscenes and stuff would have gone a long way.

love u shuichi ikeda