I spent a decent part of this week playing the beta test for Nexus Amina, the newest game from Mihoyo. If you haven’t heard of Mihoyo before, they’re mostly known for making a god-scrillion dollars off Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero.
That’s a real number. Don’t look it up.
Nexus Amina is a monster collector autochess game, with a reasonably sized open world city to explore, quests, and a lot of autochess battles. Since this was a beta, I don’t think there’s much purpose in really talking about the game as a whole quite yet. That’s not to say there wasn’t a lot of content, just that it was in a state that I’d call unpolished for Mihoyo.
Instead I want to talk about the two parts of the game that stood out to me: the quests and the combat.
Quests
If I was smart, I would have taken some screenshots of the quests, but I did not. Anyway, the thing that makes them interesting is that compared to most mobile game quests, they actually have a ridiculous number of branching paths.
I’m not actually sure if this is a good thing, but it’s definitely interesting. It was a bit of a shock to have to pay attention to what was happening at all.
Now, the reason I don’t want to pass judgement on if this was good or bad is mostly because while the branching paths are present, the current quests are in a rough state, and I often found myself more frustrated then anything else. One notable moment was a quest where I had “solved” the mystery, but there was no option to resolve it based on the info I’d discovered.
I’ve seen what Mihoyo’s polish looks like from their other games, and I can’t see them releasing a game that feels the way this currently does.
Combat
Anyway, lets talk about the combat!
Nexus Amina is an autochess, more in the vein of Dota 2 Autochess/Underlords, and Team Fight Tactics then Storybook Brawl, or Super Auto Pets.
This means that it’s mostly about placing units on a board, and then having them slug it out. Unlike most other autochess games however, its primary game mode is not an escalating PvP experience, and I don’t believe their currently is a PvP mode at all.
This turns it into a bit more of a puzzle game then anything else, where you can redeploy and shuffle units around after a loss with no penalty in most modes.
Generally speaking it’s fun enough, but I do have one big “observation” about the nature of the game. I found it very hard to develop an intuition about how unit agro worked, and this had some interesting effects on how I played.
See, in other Autochess games I’ve played, I’ve been familar with the units that are being used. This meant I had a sort of intuitive sense of how units would move around the board, and choose targets, and when units would be defeated. But because I didn’t have that in Nexus Amina, I found I couldn’t really do much in terms of positioning based strategies, and instead just focused on synergies, and building up super units.
It’s an interesting little problem.
Anyway, that’s all from me for the moment. More actual games in the next few weeks, and hopefully an announcement of a cool project?