Turn out to be as gods.
It’s no secret these days that the Change model of any multiplatform recreation will usually be the worst performing model. Alongside this reality comes the worry that the sport will run so poorly that it’s hardly practical or that it might want to considerably compromise its artwork type as a way to run. This state of issues is what makes NieR Automata on Change so spectacular; so little has been compromised to make this recreation work on a handheld that you just may not even know what’s completely different in the event you’ve by no means performed it earlier than, making a golden alternative for Change gamers to expertise what I imagine is likely one of the finest video games ever made.
In NieR Automata, you play as members of YoRHa, a staff of elite androids created to defend humanity from machine lifeforms created by alien invaders. Humanity has lengthy since retreated to a stronghold on the moon, leaving the androids and machines as the one clever life on Earth preventing a proxy warfare on behalf of creators that neither facet has ever met. As to be anticipated from a recreation written and directed by Yoko Taro, issues aren’t so simple as they appear.
It’s troublesome to speak specifics with out going into spoilers, however in a manner the specifics aren’t what’s vital right here. The vital a part of NieR’s narrative is its concentrate on extra emotional and philosophical themes that left a long-lasting affect on me after I first performed it half a decade in the past. It’s not preachy or pretentious; the concepts on show are pretty easy corresponding to “what does it imply to be alive” or “does demise have any that means,” however the concentrate on robots within the recreation’s story signifies that it isn’t as involved with asking the questions as it’s with exhibiting characters scuffling with the solutions. The journey will get deeply private at occasions, and few video games have ever hit me fairly as exhausting with its emotional intestine punches as NieR manages to do 5 years later.
Though the sport’s story is the rationale it’s so beloved, NieR Automata isn’t any slouch within the gameplay division both. Automata was developed by Platinum Video games, and it ought to really feel acquainted to anybody who’s performed their excessive octane motion video games earlier than. Fight is constructed round large combos the place you alternate between mild and heavy assaults to rack up harm on opponents. In the course of a combo you may also faucet a button to swap to a secondary weapon loadout, utterly altering your moveset primarily based on which weapons you could have outfitted. Your mild and heavy assaults every have a devoted weapon connected to them, so you could have loads of versatility in the way you wish to method fights or change up your technique.
Talking of versatility, the tools system in NieR Automata additionally offers you a whole lot of room to get artistic with its Plug-In Chips system. Plug-In Chips supply a variety of buffs and skills; some are straight upgrades to statistical data like your harm or pace, and a few give fully new results like an auto-heal while you keep away from taking harm or enabling the flexibility to counter assault. Every Plug-In Chip takes up a specific amount of reminiscence, that means you’ll want to think twice about which chips to incorporate in your construct to optimize each your fight and your reminiscence use. If you’d like a bit of additional danger vs. reward you’ll be able to even flip off primary components of the HUD as a way to unencumber some additional reminiscence for extra highly effective chips.
So, simply how effectively does it run on Change? The most important apparent change is that the sport has been locked to a 30fps cap, chopping the framerate in half. The excellent news is that it truly manages to maintain up that 30fps the vast majority of the time. A few of the larger open areas trigger the framerate to dip sometimes—the sphere throughout the canyon from the deserted mall particularly appeared to be the worst offender for no matter purpose—however substantial, noticeable dips are uncommon. Decision is far the identical story; Automata targets the utmost resolutions of 1080p in docked and 720p in handheld, and it does a reasonably good job of hitting these resolutions fairly typically. The dynamic decision does kick in to maintain efficiency clean now and again, however this by no means will get dangerous sufficient to sacrifice visible readability very a lot.
The closest factor I can discover to a real downside with the port is that some animations weirdly take longer than they did on different platforms. Essentially the most noticeable examples are the intentional slowdown impact while you take important harm, the looks of textual content on the pause menus, and the transition into the hacking minigame. I don’t know for certain what’s occurring right here, however I think that these animations are tied to the framerate, and the lower from 60fps to 30fps causes them to run slower. The intense facet is that these animations have been so quick to start with that I actually assume that in the event you’ve by no means performed the sport on one other platform you gained’t even discover that something is mistaken.
NieR Automata is considered one of my favourite video games ever made. I used to be nervous about how it might maintain up on Change, particularly given how troublesome its PC port was at launch, and I’m extremely blissful to have been mistaken to fret. This could be the very best third-party Change port I’ve ever performed, which makes it extremely straightforward to suggest this recreation to anybody who has by no means performed it earlier than. There are merely no two methods about it: NieR Automata was a triumph of design in 2017, and it’s a triumph of porting large video games to Change in 2022.