OH my God I only knew them for like two minutes but I've grown so fond of them.

First, they use proper lifting procedure- lift with your legs, not the back. OSHA approved...wait would OSHA cover sentient robots?

Superman thanks robots that claim to lack emotions.

Him seemingly rolling his eyes like he's heard this spiel before.

The bots immediately contradicting this by 12 being visibly happy.

Them trying to be gentle when he's either: in pain, or indestructible. To summarize, they're funny guys and I hope to see more of them in the movie!

The House of El

Nitro Gen Omega launched into Early Access on Steam this week and after 4+ hours with it I’ve personally been having a terrific time with the game; rotating playtime between it, REMATCH & Tron Catalyst all of which are recent releases from my personal list of most anticipated games of the year.

Though it’s pretty blatant at a glance, Nitro Gen Omega is a heavily anime-influenced tactical Mecha RPG. You start as a quartet of young freelance mech pilots who share control of a heavy duty mech which your squad utilizes for assisting in the defense & odd jobs of the sparse remnants of humanity living within elevated cities out of reach of the dangerous, self-sustaining robotic menace which have made the surface their territory.

Since the announcement of Nitro Gen Omega, I have been absolutely entranced by the game’s art style, fluidity & dynamism of the animations for the Mechs & Pilots alike. All of the elements harmonize perfectly to induce the effect of playing through an episode of an obscure late 90s to early-2010s mecha anime series that might have shown up between episodes of G Gundam, Big O or Outlaw Star on Toonami/Adult Swim.

One simple yet extremely impactful element it includes, taking cues from XCOM, Darkest Dungeon, Etrian Odyssey etc, is the ability to randomly generate your pilots & name your ragtag bunch; a feature which goes a long way towards making me wholly invested in their adventure. I also find it astounding how the different poses & styles of the various pilots reflexively triggers one’s imagination to start characterizing them without the need for a lot of cutscenes or major dialog exchanges.

EDIT: The devs at DESTINYbit worked hard to also include a ground-up Character Creator function allowing players to not only craft & customize their own roster of characters in both the parameters of the physical to fashionable but include their created cast in either their starting company of pilots or pitched into the random pool of recruitable pilots that you can hire on from settlements during a playthrough.

The team you’ve fashioned also becomes even more dynamic & endearing due to the downtime moments on your freelancers’ personal airship. Post-battle you’ll get the chance to use a certain resource that grants you an opportunity to have one or a pair of your pilots do an activity to boost skills, raise their mood/build morale & enrich (or even possibly sour) the friendships amongst the crew.

If all that wasn’t enough to draw me in particular, then the novel timeline-focused, positioning-dependent battle system the game sports ultimately sealed the deal for me & led me to buying the Early Access release. This overview video from the developer DESTINYbit’s own YT channel breaks it down better than I ever could:

Honestly, my sole concern at this point is that I might burn myself out on the game’s Early Access before v1.0 launches 😅 Though I’m excited for the journey as an early adopter either way.

The quality on display in NGO so far has me genuinely optimistic that the game can increase in depth and worthwhile, amazing content. I know there are a lot of gamers who have a very understandable aversion to buying games in Early Access but regardless of a purchase or not, I still give my glowing support for the series & hope that anyone interested will at least keep an eye on the game, Wishlist it & share its existence with others as it sprints up the road to Full Release