Nexuiz released.

Nexuiz has finally been released today over on Xbox Live Arcade. It's great to see another arena shooter on the market, especially after such a huge gap since the last one. I have been playing Nexuiz today where I can, and so far it is holding up as a solid shooter. I won't be writing a full review yet as I don't believe I have played it enough, and I will also wait for the PC release as this is where I am used to playing games.

With the brief play testing I have done so far however I do believe that it has the potential to hold up in the competitive market with a few changes. The Nex, Nexuiz' equivalent of the railgun, seems to be a tad strong right now, killing any player who doesn't have armor. The mutators however are a great introduction to arena shooters, and with the ability to turn a few off in the custom match options will be a great tweak for competitive play. I feel some don't belong within a competitive environment, such as the ability to kill yourself while holding the flag to gain a capture. There are however some really good ones like the ability to give your team their favorite weapon when you activate it. The downside to this is it gives them the weapon that they have the most kills with, you can't actually set which weapon you want. I feel this would be a much better idea as I usually switch to a shotgun or machine gun based weapon to pick-up kills if I know that they are low.

Illfonic have also been working with the MLG while developing the game, and I have been following them over on the MLG forums. It's great to see the lead developers working so closely with the community, and the fact that they are looking at supporting the tournament community and also allowing us to develop custom content on the PC is a huge bonus as most companies decide to ignore this feature in todays DLC littered world. I believe that Nexuiz has the potential to become a huge game in the competitive scene, and is certainly a breath of fresh air from the modern combat genre dominance we are experiencing right now.