AI has taken over the planet. Humanity is on its last legs, stuck in floating havens suspended above the surface. I, however, am controlling a four-person team of pilots stomping around in a vaguely simian robot. This whole apocalypse schtick ain’t too bad after all.
Nitro Gen Omega is a turn-based tactical fighter where your team of “Fools” fights giant enemy robots using your big friendly one. You start a campaign by generating a team of four pilots, each taking control of a different station in the suit. Each Fool gets one action per turn, which is placed on a timeline. You and the enemies take it in turns building up this timeline, and when all actions are placed, that timeline is resolved. Rinse and repeat until one side is dead. The battlefield is split into four quadrants, ranged attacks, unsurprisingly, have range, whereas melee attacks need to be made in the same quadrant.
How this works in reality is a system that feels simple, but quickly starts to unravel into a complex kind of dance, where you try and predict the best place to lay your moves to fit around not only what the enemy has declared now, but what they might play in response. It has all the hallmarks of good strategy — whenever something goes wrong, I can unravel exactly what rushed or idiotic decision I made that got me punished.
You have to manage heat and ammo in fights, as well as the armour of your mech and the mental status of your Fools. This doesn’t stop when you leave battles either, as when traveling around the world you have to manage the team’s supplies, fatigue, and more. When trying to write all this down, it feels incredibly overwhelming, but when you actually play it I promise that it feels seamless. I don’t want the review to just be a list of features, but it’s difficult to give the whole system justice by talking about how it feels, because you just don’t notice it. You’re just playing a Saturday morning cartoon.
This carries to the visual presentation as well, and is one of the few negatives that I have about Nitro Gen Omega. The generated Fools don’t look… great, and animation can at times be choppy and uneven. This feels like a stylistic choice rather than a technical one, and it isn’t one that I personally agree with. Like the cartoons I assume we all grew up watching, at the start of every battle, you have a full suiting up and activating sequence. Whilst relatively short, with the frequency of the battles I did, I ended up spending a lot of time mashing the skip buttons to get through them.
That is honestly the closest I’ve got to a negative with my time here though. Much like cartoons, if I’m in the right mood I can binge a bunch of episodes, but sometimes I do get a little bored of the core loop and have to check out after an hour. This is very much a me problem I think, but the comparison is the kindest I can give it. If you just want something bright, flashy and fun, I can highly recommend jumping in and playing for as long as you feel like it.
You play through a main quest, with optional side missions and contracts, and once all that is tied up you can just freeplay with that team once the main quest is wrapped up. There are three main mech types to unlock as you play through, and progression is relatively smooth, if a little top heavy in the early hours of the game (understandably).
I honestly can’t recommend Nitro Gen Omega enough, it’s a game that has been on my wishlist since I first saw it announced and I’m so happy it meets every expectation I had for it now that it has landed. If you just want to jump into some campy cartoon mecha action, there are few better places I can think of than here.
Nitro Gen Omega was reviewed on Xbox Series X, but is also available on PC (Epic Games Store & Steam), Switch, and Playstation 5.
