Daemon X Machina (Switch) review "An earnest blend of style and substance that is a lot of fun, even if it doesn’t always hit the mark."

Released in 2019, First Studio’s Daemon X Machina presents an edgy, aesthetic mech experience that combines the theatre of retro anime with some stylish—if sometimes frustrating—mech action.

Set in world where a portion of the moon has collided with the Earth, Daemon X Machina sees players take on the role of ‘The Rookie’, the newest addition to a class of mercenaries known as ‘Outers’. These Outers pilot mech units called ‘Arsenals’ to fight a species of AI organisms, finding themselves caught in webs of politics and warfare in the process.

Opting for a middle-ground between slower, strategic play and arcade-style action, Daemon X Machina provides a satisfying loop that prioritises action, movement, and spectacle over heavily intricate strategy.

Core gameplay involves piloting your Arsenal as you complete missions that usually involve destroying enemies or protecting specific targets. The general flow of battle heavily preferences movement, with forgiving aim, enemy-seeking weaponry, and deceptively versatile movement options. Players’ mechs can navigate both horizontal and vertical movement to engage in grounded and aerial combat. Grounded combat sometimes feels less dynamic than aerial combat, due to the removal of one plane of movement, but enables the use of additional heavy weapons such as rail guns, which require stability to fire.

Daemon X Machina presents a fairly wide range of weapons that—while certainly more modest than other mech games can be—provides decent scope for player experimentation and customisation. Some weapons can risk feeling counter intuitive at first, but there is a satisfying level of feedback and mastery that makes getting use to specific weapons quite fun. This is particularly true of melee weapons, which not only provide good scope for damage output, but enable quite visceral fast paced close quarters combat in a satisfying way.

Unfortunately, aspects of the control scheme, coupled the pacing and speed of play mean that as a player character, you sometimes feel less ‘in control’ of movement than NPC pilots and enemies. Balancing five-axis movement and aiming with positioning means that keeping track of enemies—particularly fast-moving ones—can sometimes feel chaotic and outside of direct player control.

This generally doesn’t adversely affect your ability to complete missions, however when seeing NPC arsenals flit about a battlefield in full command of their mechs across all five axes, it brings their AI nature into stark focus. Movement controls using the Switch controller’s gyro might mitigate this, as might significant practice, but it can be frustrating to see NPCs flawlessly using blinks and aerial manoeuvres while you’re fumbling around trying to aim.

Despite this, Daemon X Machina’s gameplay loop and pacing is generally engrossing and quite enjoyable. The mission-based structure practises relatively condensed, short sessions of action, which means that if you’re someone short of free time, completing a mission or two is a neat and achievable outcome for a session of play.

The world of Daemon X Machina is dramatic and bleak, as the moon’s impact crater spreads the substance ‘femto’ that provides vast stores of energy, but corrupts the landscape and those exposed to it. Players embark on an intense journey as they seek to quell an AI invasion and find the truth behind the substance known as femto.

Narrative-wise, Daemon X Machina manages to both surpass expectations and inspire subtle cringing by presenting a story that commits heavily to its aesthetic. In many ways the story is a little ham-fisted, and risks leaning into the ‘edge’ so hard at times that it becomes corny. Despite this, there’s an earnestness to the storytelling, and the combination of edginess and theatrics pulls together a narrative that—while not always hitting the mark in the moment—is greater the sum of its parts.

Praise for the storytelling aside, Daemon X Machina leaves one aspect of the narrative without enough of the love it deserves. For a game with a narrative propelled by the bonds between the characters, and largely structured by pre- and post-mission banter, Daemon X Machina’s ‘Outers’ themselves feel sadly underexplored. The game features a relatively full and colourful cast, however few characters receive any kind of narrative exploration, and some disappear from the narrative altogether.

Ultimately, Daemon X Machina presents a narrative that is largely earnest and engaging, if sometimes a touch on-the-nose. There’s a certain intrigue to the storytelling, but some key strengths of the narrative are left frustratingly unrealised.

It would be difficult to discuss Daemon X Machina without looking at its styling and representation. Drenched in a near-constant crimson, the videogame embodies a clear sense of aesthetic identity that washes across the user interface, landscape, and environment.

In terms of graphics themselves, Daemon X Machina presents a cell-shaded style that strongly draws on anime-inspired visuals. Generally, the game looks neatly stylistic, with the combination of a limited—or rather purposeful—colour palette and heavy bloom showing the world of the Oval Link, and the Arsenals off well. The use of clear-cut shadows on character models sometimes leads to some unusual visual artefacts, but the style is usually consistent and enjoyable.

Daemon X Machina draws strongly on its anime inspirations, with character models often sporting exaggerated hairstyles to match their specific character stereotypes. This is contrasted with the visual construction of the world, which largely features industrial post-apocalyptic landscapes. In combination, this creates a neatly contrasting, and heavily readable world, where character designs are emphasised against their environment for visual impact.

Daemon X Machina’s visual construction is one of its strongest elements, presenting a heavily intentional and stylist concept that shirks realism in favour of a unique identity and heavy spectacle.

All in all, Daemon X Machina is a flawed yet endearing experience. It is not perfect by any means, but it presents an interesting concept and emphasises a sense of ‘fun’ that is not always present in mech videogames.

For anyone looking to play a theatrical and stylistic action game, Daemon X Machina might be worth your time. If you’re looking for a seriously tactical mech experience, your attention is best placed elsewhere.

Community review by cjdh (September 04, 2025) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.