Nexuiz

It's a gussied up, late 90s and early 2000s shooter, high on fun and low on pretention and cludgy mechanics. You'll pick up power-ups, gun down foes and that's about it. It's simple and fun with just the right mix of running and gunning.

Just an excuse really for multiplayer deathmatches in their purest and most enjoyable form. [May 2012, p.87]

Nexuiz is a smart, speedy shooter for a great price.

This game is crazy Neapolitan through and through, with a sense of mad glee for how frequently and flagrantly it breaks the rules.

A funny multiplayer action game of the old school: simple and frenetic. A perfect game for gamers that love games like Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament.

When a full match plays out uninterrupted, Nexuiz is divine. But the sudden see-saw in balance when someone leaves or having to wait in a lobby indefinitely during non-peak hours mark frustrating aspects of the package.

I had a great time with this little downloadable shooter, and I think that anyone who is nostalgic for another game of this type, or even a Call of Duty veteran, will find something to love here.

Although the shooter market is crowded with many titles, Nexuiz has some interesting new features that make it diferent. It doesn't try to compete with the likes of Call of Duty or Battlefield, but is a fun, quick and ever changing game, recommended for those looking for something different.

Nexuiz can't hold a candle to full-priced war games, but its mix of constant speed and occasional silliness make it just the thing for when you've got only 10 minutes to kill. [Apr 2012, p.80]

With limited multiplayer options (and no single-player modes other than bot training), long waits for matches to start, boring weapons, and a carrot-on-a-stick progression system that is way more stick than carrot, Nexuiz is doomed to obscurity.

Nexuiz is the perfect fusion between speed and accessibility. A minimal amount of choice in game modes ruins longevity and some online problems can sometimes be frustrating.

Nexuiz offers an old-school gameplay, but finds its own identity by adding some interesting features. If you're a fan of the genre you can't miss it.

At a cheap 800 Microsoft points, the game certainly merits trying. It goes without saying that as more people purchase it, the game's experience will only become better. Until then, long load times and a tough reward system ensure that it certainly caters to the niche of insanely fast-shooters, but might be unforgiving and underwhelming to other types of gamers.

Sure, Nexuiz is a fun shooter, but only under the right conditions. Unfortunately those right conditions are pretty rare, leaving you with unbalanced teams and terrible music.

Nexuiz meets the bar of quality you'd expect from a console arena shooter, and does very little to rise above it. If that's enough for you, Nexuiz will not disappoint.

The overall impression is of a thoroughly mediocre arena-shooter that never quite manages to deliver. On a crowded online market Nexuiz is reduced to a short term affair without much longevity. As this is a game that relies solely on an active multiplayer community, it's hard to tell how long Illfonic can manage to keep this going. Unfortunately, Nexuiz is not the game to revive the arena-shooter.

As beloved as the subgenre and the original Nexuiz mod are among a certain crowd, this Xbox Live Arcade remake is nothing more than a haphazard port of a 2005 mod for a game that came out 10 years ago – except you have to pay money for it. Those of us older folks who are nostalgic for the gameplay Nexuiz emulates likely have a PC that runs any of the dozens of excellent alternatives, and the younger console crowd has plenty of more modern shooters to choose from.

It's hard to forget that even after the numerous PC updates, you're playing a nearly seven year-old game, and after a few hours, it feels that way. If you are looking to take a trip back to the glory days of Quake mods, Nexuiz is what you are looking for. Just don't expect to stay for long.

It's a solid little shooter, but there are so many different ways to shoot people online now that it's hard to get excited at a game like this one. [May 2012, p.60]

Nexuiz fails to transform or improve previous experiences of a genre that has great references.

With a better matchmaking system and more multiplayer options, it would be easier to recommend. As it stands, with so many quality shooters in the budget download market (or even the free-to-play market, for that matte), the few intriguing pieces of Nexuiz aren't enough to lift it above the crowd.

It all adds up to shallow pleasure that quickly gives way to a litany of niggling frustrations. Nexuiz is fine with the broad strokes, thanks largely to a tried-and-trusted style of gameplay that is inherently appealing, but it's in the nuance and details that it really comes unstuck.

Nothing we haven't seen before. [June 2012, p.101]

This is an old-fashioned and totally uninspired online arena shooter that one can hardly recommend – and not only because you will have problems to find someone on the deserted servers.

An unbearably bland arena-based shooter that only manages to make the Quake-style action seem more old-fashioned and irrelevant than ever.

It just feels generic. It feels like they took what the original developers made and added a shiny gloss to it, ignoring what made it special to the time period it originally existed in. There's nothing that feels special about Nexiuz, neither changes that make it feel comfortable on its new home, nor any additional features to warrant a special purchase.