Nier: Automata
99.95 | PC, PS4 | WWW.NIER-AUTOMATA.COM A surreal, unpredictable and unmissable action RPG.
In this age of games doing their utmost to resemble dramatic Hollywood blockbusters, Nier: Automata is an immensely gratifying breath of fresh air. If you can imagine a game with the bombastic unpredictability of a Hideo Kojima title, mixed with the self-aware melodrama of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, then you’re about halfway towards understanding the tone of this game. Which is, by the way, a masterpiece.
You play as 2B, a highly lethal android recruited to avenge planet Earth from brutal alien colonisers. In order to do this, you’ve got a growing arsenal of fluid hand-to-hand weapon and melee attacks, as well as a handy floating robot which doubles as a machine gun. As most have come to expect of Platinum Games, the combat is fast and fluid, and engaging with enemies is its own reward. While the action takes place over a fairly rudimentary apocalyptic open world, Nier: Automata is notable for its utterly bonkers set pieces, which appear and depart as frequently and randomly as fetch-quests do in other RPGs (though to be fair, Nier: Automata has fetch quests, too, just not too many).
As for those set pieces, they’re more than just staged instances of skyscrapers collapsing: sometimes, they deviate entirely from the main theme. The game’s introduction, for example, is at once a side-scroller, a top-down bullet hell shooter and a third-person action RPG. Later, when exploring the small but functional open world, the camera will often shift to a fixed topdown view. While most open-world games promise oodles of repetitive content in the name of bang for buck, Nier opts instead to surprise around every corner, to offer new experiences rather than variations of the same one.
And while the game can’t match most major Western games in terms of fidelity and scale, it shames all competition in terms of style and execution.
The music, composed by series mainstay Keiichi Okabe, is at once enlivening and sweetly melancholic. One of Nier’s early narrative beats takes place in a psychedelic carnival inhabited by both hostile and friendly helper robots, and the combination of the beautiful fairground environment and Okabe’s surreal score is unforgettably strange.
2B’s story is longwinded but, crucially, never boring. It’s not necessarily the unpredictability of its narrative or the depth of its characters that makes Nier’s story so captivating. Rather, it’s the cleverness of the writing and its willingness to alienate unimaginative players that makes for such an unforgettable ride.
Rarely is a major action RPG imbued with such a surreal streak, and rarely would a publisher dare push something out to a market which doesn’t echo the severe and overbearingly worthy tone of games like Horizon Zero Dawn.
Even if you can’t stomach Nier’s weirdness (and if so: why, you sad sack??) it’s good that games as odd as this can still exist.
Shaun Prescott