Think mechs and you’ll probably imagine something at least the size of a building, or not far from the 65-foot Unicorn Gundam displayed in Odaiba, Japan. Daemon x Machina’s mechs, referred to as Arsenals, aren’t quite as large, but you still could only pilot them by climbing into a cockpit. For the sequel, Daemon x Machina: Titanic Scion, the Arsenals have undergone a more significant change–Arsenals are no longer mechs, but mech suits. It’s an important distinction, because you get the sense that your movements are 1:1 when you’re boosting along the ground or swinging your blade. Playing the opening hours of Titanic Scion, the game I’m surprised to have as a reference point is Anthem.
It might not make for a flattering comparison, but then you are playing as a custom avatar who can fly around in a powerful and customizable mech suit in an open world with the ability to take on missions with other players online. But unlike BioWare’s doomed game, this doesn’t feel like a misguided attempt at a live-service loot-grinding game. If anything, Titanic Scion feels like a genuine step up from its predecessor that was developed originally within the constraints of the Nintendo Switch, which managed to retain a striking visual style of red and metallic palettes that screams both anime and metal, but still felt constricted by the hardware.
Titanic Scion begins with an exposition-laden opening crawl, which also highlights in red some terms you’ll be encountering more over the course of the story, though the one that’s probably best to familiarize yourself with is “outers.” These are beings who have transcended humanity and as such are also treated as outcasts, leaving them ripe for exploitation. That also happens to be the protagonist that you get to create, with the flexibility to mix hair styles, body types, and voices. Your hero wakes up in some kind of facility in outer space called the Garden and is set to be turned into a “centurion” before suddenly being thrust in media res into an escape mission.
A man the protagonist recognizes called Nerve breaks us out and the two quickly commandeer some Arsenal suits for a getaway. Your Arsenal can equip a weapon in each hand, which can be swapped with other equipment on the fly to mix and match the situation, with the left trigger using the weapon on your left arm, and the right trigger for your right-handed weapon. Whether it’s a ranged rifle or a sword, your attacks can lock onto your enemy, allowing you to lunge towards an enemy when swinging a melee weapon.
The right bumper meanwhile allows for an emergency dodge from attacks, which uses up stamina. Separate from that is another gauge for Femto, which is required for other skills such as boosting or flying. However, you’re soon overwhelmed by the number of enemies, including an intimidatingly larger crimson Centurion, that are after you. In the ensuing escape, you’re separated from Nerve and fall all the way down onto the red planet below to find new allies in the form of another Arsenal user called Forge and his seemingly robotic son, Toby.
There are, of course, also threats of another kind down on this hostile desert wasteland: immortals, beasts that are the result of outers corrupted by femto energy, although the ones you encounter early on are easy to dispatch, allowing you to loot their remains for parts. Interestingly, when you do defeat an enemy that drops loot, you can only loot one item before the rest is lost. So rather than spamming a button prompt, you do have to think about whether you’re after a new piece of gear, a handy consumable item, or materials that could be useful later.
After a pretty hairy escape from the Garden, it’s also pretty clear you need better gear, so while following Forge and Toby back to their home base, you can not only salvage gear from nearby immortals, but also scavenge materials by smashing red femtrees to recover femto or mining parts of the environment for ore.
Having a scanner to scan nearby surroundings also helps exploring the open world, though the most welcome realization was that I didn’t have to follow them on foot and by simply double-tapping jump, your jet boots activate. That lets you easily fly around the map, using more femto to speed up, and encounter enemies flying above that you can pick a fight with. Flying feels easy to do and is clearly the fastest and most exhilarating way to travel, and taking to the sky to engage enemies in aerial combat feels just as good as on the ground. You can easily stop your momentum midflight to drop back down or resume flying while in freefall–there’s a rewarding sense of strategy to flying well and leveraging your speed and positioning to your advantage.
After reaching the home base, the structure of Titanic Scion really begins to take shape. This serves as the hub where you can take on missions, upgrade facilities, and even eat ice cream to increase some of your perks. But unlike its predecessor where you always select and load into your mission from your hangar, you can select multiple missions and then head out into the open world to tackle them as you see fit, as you can track them on the map, while you’ll also be able to make use of fast travel points as you discover them.
You’re free to play missions in online co-op in a group of up to three players, but you can also opt to play offline by yourself. I actually didn’t have the opportunity to test out online co-op during my hands-on, but I still noticed some welcome asynchronous elements if you go online, even if you don’t party up. For instance, you might encounter wreckages of other players where they had previously fallen, which you can salvage for their gear. Base points can also have supply bases built where you can spend credits to recover health or change your loadout instead of fast-traveling back to home base, but the interesting thing is when playing online, you’ll be able to access supply bases built by other players. It looks like you can also be mean and have other players’ supply bases disassembled, but I’m not entirely sure as the preview did not address how my actions in my game might affect others. It’s possible I was merely only screwing myself over by destroying a resource I could have used.
Playing as a character in a mech suit rather than piloting a large mech also has other advantages, as it allows for some additional interactions. While I’m sure most will be happy with jetting around in the air, I was amused to discover that you can also mount and ride corrupted but nonetheless non-hostile horses on the ground, while you later get to ride on a turret, mowing down packs of immortal beasts. The cool skills are nonetheless reserved for when you’re fighting as an Arsenal, like being able to attack an enemy until they flinch, letting you grab them and chuck them against the wall or into another enemy. Or you might get locked into a melee showdown with another mech that results in a standoff as your blades clash and you mash the button to knock them back. These mechanics have all the energy of a late noughties action game, and I’m very much here for it.
However, I’m also intrigued by factors, an element introduced late in the preview, which alter your genes and unlock new skills or passive buffs. While it’s still too early in the game to see how deep the system goes, what’s most intriguing is that by becoming more inhumanly powerful, there will be a physical cost, as it will lead to visibly physical mutations on your body, from new markings on your arms and chest to your face becoming drastically less human. While you can technically reset this, the cost is also very high (at least in the early hours) that you’ll probably want to carefully consider the consequences of gaining power at the cost of your physical appearance. The preview didn’t detail whether this transformation has a more tangible gameplay effect as well, but if it does, then that’s an even heavier consideration.
The first several hours of Daemon x Machina: Titanic Scion seems to barely scratch the surface, but I’m looking forward to how it all comes together when it releases on PC, Nintendo Switch 2, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on September 5.
