Review – Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion for Nintendo Switch 2

The first Daemon X Machina landed on the original Nintendo Switch six years ago, bringing with it fast-paced mech action. The title made a small splash among fans itching for a new mecha-focused action game, but otherwise it came and went without much fanfare. I myself didn’t have any real hope we’d see the series revisited in any capacity, so imagine my surprise when Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion was announced back in 2023. I enjoyed the first game and have recommended it to several people over the years, so I was excited to see what else the team had in store for the sequel.

The story of Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion takes place several years after the end of the first game, and thankfully for me, can be enjoyed without any knowledge (or memory, in my case) of the story of the first game. Starting with a grand escape from a space station that serves as a tutorial for the game’s combat controls, Titanic Scion sees you take control of a fully customizable Outer, a genetically enhanced human, who is caught in the middle of a war between a group of Outers known as the Sovereign Axiom and a group of humans called the Reclaimers.

Dameon X Machina: Titanic Scion’s character creation hits the sweet spot of being incredibly customizable without having too many minute details to get lost in. There are tons of ways to tweak your Outer’s facial appearance — hairstyle, accessories, etc. — but not a big depth of options for body customization. I loved spending a bunch of time getting to perfect my Outer before I dove in, which felt especially worth it as I started the game to find that this time around your Outer is fully voiced and has an actual personality in cutscenes, which is a huge step up from the silent protagonist of the first Daemon X Machina.

 

 

Like in the first game, combat takes place mostly in your Arsenal, a mechanical suit that can be upgraded and customized, and carries a host of weapons for you to fight with. Unlike the first Daemon X Machina, the Arsenals in Titanic Scion are small, Iron Man-like exosuits rather than big mechs for your Outer to pilot. Upon finding out this information I was pretty bummed, as the big mech combat was a huge reason I was drawn to the first Daemon X Machina back in 2019. Upon playing Titanic Scion I found that the way that combat in these smaller Outers plays out feels more similar to the first game than I expected, thankfully, though I did find I was missing that weighty “oomph” that a larger mech offered.

The smaller Arsenals feel very speedy when fighting, which keeps most combat moving at a very fast pace, and the weapon options in Titanic Scion are greatly expanded, with your Arsenal able to wield eight different close-combat weapon classes in addition to firearms and shields. Weapons like knives, laser blades, and lances are fast moving and can chain combos quickly, while heavier weapons like two-handed swords and maces are slower to swing but hit very hard. Of course there are plenty of firearm options too, with machine guns, bazookas, laser cannons, and more available to you to wield against enemies. With your Arsenal able to carry up to four main weapons at once for you to freely switch between, you can customize your combat style to your liking and make sure you’re ready for anything Titanic Scion throws at you.

 

 

Your Arsenal’s customization doesn’t stop at weapons, of course. Just about everything about your Arsenal can be customized to fit both your fighting style and your preferred visual style. You can acquire parts and pieces of other downed Arsenals to customize the look and performance of your Arsenal, and then recolor or pattern it however you please back at your base. You’re also able to unlock decals to apply freely to your Arsenal, and can combine and layer the decals to create one-of-a-kind custom decals you can then apply to your Arsenal. I was a big fan of trying to make my Arsenal still look big and bulky like the bigger mechs of the first game and I was happy to be able to do that. I’m also a huge sucker for making my custom characters and their equipment look lived-in and unique and all of the options that Titanic Scion offered to do that blew me away.

You’ll get plenty of chances to take your customized Arsenal out into the world to fight too. Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion does away with the strict, structured mission-style levels of the first game and instead offers a pretty huge open world for you to play around in. You’ll still be sent out on missions as part of the story, of course, but you’re free to explore, fight enemies, scavenge for parts, and basically just goof off as you see fit. Titanic Scion’s smaller Arsenals are great at moving around the vast landscape, but you also allow for other modes of transportation thanks to being sized similar to normal humans. This allows you to pilot vehicles like trucks or motorcycles, or even ride wild horses you can find dotted around the map. Horse riding isn’t the first thing I’d expect from a futuristic mechanic action game, but it’s pretty hilarious to see what is essentially a robot riding around a post-apocalyptic world on a horse, so I’m not complaining.

Titanic Scion’s story feels a bit more grounded and easier to follow than the story of the original Daemon X Machina, partly thanks to a hefty wall of text explaining the world’s history and introducing most of the big players and the stakes that pops up as you start a new game, but also thanks to the protagonist having a real personality and dialogue, as I mentioned before. A lot of the cringey anime-tropes that abounded in the first game have been toned down in this one as well, and there are nowhere near as many over-the-top characters to deal with, though a pretty prevalent early character by the name of Ash angrily yells just about every line of dialogue he has, which is so out of place in the context of the other characters having calm conversations that you kind of just have to laugh at it and move on.

 

 

Outside of the story you can take on normal missions around the world, helping out the various Reclaimers that share a base with you or gathering materials to help you improve the base itself. As you complete missions you’ll also earn credits which you can spend at the base’s store to buy new armor or weapons for your Arsenal. You can also spend credits at the base’s ice cream parlor, where different flavors of ice cream give you various state boosts or other buffs for a limited time. At the base you can also take part in a tournament of sorts called the Colosseum, where you can face off one-on-one against other Arsenals for rewards and glory. I had a ton of fun climbing the Colosseum’s ranks to earn new decals, patterns, and weapons for my Arsenal, and the one-on-one combat against progressively harder Arsenals was a huge improvement over the Arsenal-on-Arsenal fights in the first game. If you’d rather spend your down time not fighting, the base is also home to Titanic Scion’s trading card minigame called Overbullet. I’m a big fan of card games in real life, and while Overbullet is simple, it was fun to collect different cards and build out decks to spend my time a little differently when not heading to the colosseum or out into the world to take down enemies.

As you do take down bigger enemies in the story and out in the world, you’ll also be able to take not just parts from them, but their genetic material as well, which can then be used to upgrade your Outer and unlock new skills to use during combat. The downside to this is that, in general, the better the new skill you’ll obtain, the more your Outer’s physical appearance will mutate. There’s no way I found to preview these mutations, and some of them are pretty severe. The option to reverse the mutations and set your Outer’s appearance does exist, but you’ll have to pay a huge sum of credits to do so. It’s a unique feature, but it’s a bummer to have spent so long in such a great character creator only to end up at the point where your character has been pretty severely mutated in order to get stronger.

 

 

Daemon X Machina’s performance on Switch 2 isn’t abysmal, but it also could be a lot better. The human/Outer models all look nice and detailed, as do the Arsenals themselves, but the textures of the planet’s surface as you’re out and about are often blurry or muddled. And speaking of being out and about, having this big open world to go execute missions and explore in as great, but each time you load in and out of your base either to leave on a missions or to fast travel to various locations around the world, you’ll be stuck in a long elevator for minutes at a time. It’s nice that it’s not a static loading screen, but hanging out and walking in circles in a mostly-empty elevator isn’t much better.

I didn’t notice much stutter when in combat, which is a plus, though I found that the dedicated lock on can be a bit finicky if the fighting is too fast-paced or if you’re up against more than one enemy at a time. Combat in general suffers if you’re up against more than one difficult enemy at once. An early boss fight against an enemy named Legion comes to mind, where Legion splits himself into three clones that all hit pretty frequently and pretty hard and started to feel next to impossible to manage. It was an early example of one of my gripes with Titanic Scion’s combat: it feels fast and fluid when you’re fighting smaller/weaker enemies one-on-one, but once the number of enemies or the difficulty goes up, things can often start to feel too hectic to keep track of or fight properly.

Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion ended up scratching essentially the same itch that its predecessor did, though with a few frustrating edges sanded off while adding other frustrations elsewhere. It’s good, not great, but I think that’s okay. Mechs are cool, even when they’re smaller than they used to be, and the customization that Titanic Scion offers for said cool mechs is very, very deep. Much like the first game, I’ll likely be back to this one from time to time to keep scratching that “cool mech” itch, and I’ll definitely be happy to do so.

 

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