Mad Merx: Nemesis Review

In a lot of different futures as depictd by various forms of sci-fi media, mankind will no longer destroy itself through war. That is to say, there will still be violent conflicts waged in the name of territory disputes and whatnot, but all those soldiers will have been replaced with robots. And no one will get up in arms if the robots die for their cause, right?

Mad Merx: Nemesis is a multiplayer run n’ gun third-person shooter through and through. Players assume control of one of four playable classes (once they’ve all been unlocked, anyway) and attempt to blow away the competition in an online frag fest. As players run around shooting things they’ll earn the experience and cash necessary to unlock and purchase better gear respectively. Typical third-person shooter controls (i.e. left virtual stick to move, swiping the screen to look, tap Shoot to shoot, etc) are present and should make any genre fan’s transition pretty simple.

It’s a simple thing but I rather like the style of the robo-soldiers in Mad Merx: Nemesis. They look good, and are easy to tell apart from all the other classes even at a distance. I also like how each class has its own set of weapons to unlock and equip, meaning that there’s actually a reason for players to experiment from time to time. And between all the leveling and unlocking there’s a constant need to keep playing in order to access more and more content.

In practice, however, Mad Merx: Nemesis is a little less impressive. I’ve noticed consistent control issues when attempting to move immediately after a spawn that typically resulted in swiping to look moving my character instead or, even worse, accidentally spraying precious bullets (which can actually run out and need to be restocked with in-game cash during a match) harmlessly into the air. It’s not quite so bad when playing the offline Free for All mode since the AI is made up of one part elite marksman (seriously, the Commando’s shotgun is like a one-hit kill even over great distances!) and one part sack of rocks, but wasting ammo for no reason isn’t a good thing regardless. I wish I could say things are better in multiplayer but I honestly couldn’t say for certain as every single attempt I’ve made resulted in an unplayable level of lag over wi-fi. I’d say it might be my connection but I’ve played similar games with similar multiplayer modes without incident before, so chances are it’s an optimization problem.

Mad Merx: Nemesis is decent fun, especially for a free online multiplayer shooter, but there are better choices out there. If it didn’t take quite so long to level up and unlock new classes or suffer from some pretty severe online problems it might be more of a contender, but as-is it’s fairly mundane.