I love a good anime-inspired mech game. Nimbus Infinity is the sequel to Project Nimbus, a mech game that hewed closer to a dogfighter than most typical genre entries. This newest title spent some time in early access and certainly offers a similar experience on some fronts. The game’s presentation is decently attractive and there’s a lot of high-speed manoeuvring to spend time on. However, the gameplay, narrative and general mission structures are often fundamentally uninteresting or downright untenable much of the time, leading to a game that not only pales in the shadow of its predecessor, but is often a chore to attempt to play through.
Nimbus Infinity kicks off with you taking control of a young man named Taiyo. He delivers tofu with a mech and finds himself in a familiar anime scenario – a combat mech with a girl in it has crashed due to its primary pilot being injured. So Taiyo hops in and saves the day before heading off with the girl, Luna and the rest of her entourage aboard the Akatsuki – a ship clearly modelled after Mobile Suit Gundam‘s White Base.
Get ready to spend your time sitting through cutscenes
The plot hits all the standard notes of the “teenager fighting a war they don’t care about” trope. There’s a lot of very familiar parts of dialogue about how Taiyo doesn’t want to kill people and the like. It’s not terrible or anything, but it’s grating and there can be way too much talking during the game’s visual novel-style cutscenes.
Unfortunately, these visual novel sequences aren’t skippable, which is especially annoying when the game crashes during a mission and you have to rapidly click or button mash to get through the dialogue you’ve already seen. I had the game crash on me multiple times, so this wasn’t an especially rare occurrence. Everything is dubbed in English and you can tell that the cast is trying fairly hard, but a lot of the acting is stilted and the actors occasionally have trouble with the Japanese names. Despite the fact that I’m fairly certain the game itself is Japanese, there’s no Japanese voice option available.
Nimbus Infinity has two modes available: campaign and survival. Campaign mode tells the game’s story over a series of missions, while Survival obviously pits you against waves of enemies. Problems start as soon as the gameplay does. Your mech, called Warspite, feels weightless, which extends to every aspect of the gameplay in general. Boosting feels like nothing, shooting feels like nothing and melee attacks, you guessed it, feel like nothing. There is absolutely no sense that you’re piloting a powerful mech. The game is very quick, but all this manages to do is make it a struggle to focus on what you’re supposed to be doing.
Problematic combat
The lock-on presents serious issues in and of itself. You have to hit the button to lock on and then aim and shoot at an enemy’s general vicinity. It feels floaty and awful. The lock-on itself is completely unreliable and I had to constantly hit the button to actually stay locked on to anything. On top of that, it’s difficult to keep track of everything thanks to a confusing, messy UI. Combat very much suffers from the aforementioned weightlessness issues. I never felt like I was hitting anything and I’d need to watch for the hit indicator to even know if my shots gained purchase. Often, I wasn’t even sure if I was shooting to begin with. There were plenty of times that I’d be hammering on the fire button, only to realise my character wasn’t attacking at all.
Even when shooting works as intended, having to reload is a constant presence. Just like before, I often couldn’t tell whether I was shooting or reloading. Nimbus Infinity simply doesn’t do a good job of conveying information in an acceptable way. The gameplay is like air. I know it’s there but it simply doesn’t feel like it means much of anything. You just rapidly zoom around enemies while struggling to stay locked on and holding the fire button and hoping whatever you’re shooting at explodes. You can use a melee attack as well, but it’s mostly useless. You’ll dash toward whatever you’re locked onto, but I often found myself missing my target. Much like the shooting, there’s zero impact or oomph to any of these attacks.
Meanwhile, while you’re wondering if you’re even shooting or hitting anything, enemies will pelt you with gunfire. There are plenty of times in Nimbus Infinity where the areas are just completely jam-packed with enemies, so you’ll be taking huge amounts of damage solely for existing. Even if you boost as much as you can, you’ll still regularly get hit. The game mitigates this by giving you a shield that recharges, but this takes too long to kick in. Some missions can feel borderline impossible due to just how many shots you’ll have to take, which worsens as the game goes on. Laser turrets can hit you from extremely far away, which is horribly obnoxious, especially when there’s half a dozen of them firing you at once. One mission requires you to take down larger enemy ships equipped with these and it’s just horrendously bad.
You have to destroy pretty much all of a ship’s components to take it down and locking on to and hitting these while dodging huge amounts of enemy fire is very difficult to do. It just feels awful. Missions typically require you to destroy all enemies or fulfil a simple objective, such as disposing of EMP mines. Occasionally you’ll fight bosses. Some of these are also quite terrible, including a boss that regenerates its shields constantly, requiring you to do large amounts of damage in a small window just to win. If you don’t bring the right weapons, you’ll likely have to restart missions later on when unexpected issues pop up.
Combat woes continue
The weapon systems also has its share of issues. Before you deploy for each mission in Nimbus Infinity, you can change out four types of equips on Warspite, including a sidearm, main weapon and missiles. But this resets every time you clear a mission, so you need to re-equip your weapons at the start of each sortie. While playing, you can switch between three different stances for Warspite as well – defence, offense and speed. It pays to stick to defence considering how much is shooting at you at once, though and switching between stances feels somewhat clunkier than I would have liked.
When all is said and done, I had a pretty awful time with Nimbus Infinity. It looks decent enough despite how serious the framerate issues can be in certain areas (early areas often dipped to a nigh-unbearable 20 fps with a fairly decent modern rig,) but almost all of the decisions made here, from the story to the gameplay and mission design were all just poorly considered, even if it’s cool to see how quickly everything moves. Anyone who hasn’t played Project Nimbus should consider checking that one out, but give this one a miss. It’s a chore to play, crashes a lot, and has some of the most unsatisfying gameplay I’ve ever seen in a mech title.
Nimbus Infinity: Nimbus Infinity has the speed and looks, but lacks practically everything else you'd want from a mech game. – Andrew Farrell
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