Nemesis: Lockdown

I came into Nemesis: Lockdown expecting something closer to a shooter - the Mars base setting, the alien infestation, the knife-and-gun loadout. What I got was a turn-based card management game with a hidden-traitor twist, and honestly, once that clicked, the loop got genuinely compelling. Every action you take - moving between rooms, searching for items, fending off Intruders with knives, guns, or fire - costs cards from your hand. Managing that hand tightly across 15 rounds is the actual skill expression here, not reflexes or aim. There is no polling rate that helps you. The core design is semi-cooperative, and that tension is where the game earns its keep. Each player draws a secret objective at the start. Some objectives align with the group; some absolutely do not. One player might be quietly working to make sure the alien outbreak spreads, or to ensure a specific crew member never makes it to an escape pod. The digital version handles all the bookkeeping the physical game notoriously buries you in - tracking infection cards, resolving random event decks, rolling combat outcomes - and strips most of the friction away. Sessions that clock 90-plus minutes on a tabletop run considerably faster here, which is a genuine quality-of-life win for anyone who has sat through a four-hour board game night that ended in argument. The presentation holds up. Fully animated 3D environments in isometric view give the Mars base real atmosphere, and the event log that tracks every action and round outcome is something more digital board games should steal. The tutorial, post-launch, is functional enough to get newcomers through the card mechanics without having to watch external videos. UI still has rough edges - card abilities do not always display cleanly, and some room interactions are poorly labelled - but nothing that breaks a session if you know the rules. Here is the problem, and it is a real one: the online player base is thin. Peak concurrent players hit 381 on launch day in 2022 and has never recovered. Finding a random lobby today is close to impossible. The game also has no bot fill, so if you want the full multiplayer social experience, you are recruiting from the developer's Discord or bringing your own group. Steam community feedback mentions the developer has moved on to new projects without fully finishing the bug pass on this one, which leaves some card display issues and interaction inconsistencies unresolved in the live build. For a game where reading your cards correctly is everything, that stings. If you are a Nemesis board game fan who wants to play online with a pre-arranged group of friends, this delivers. It runs faster, costs a fraction of the physical box, and handles all the fiddly rules automation cleanly enough. If you are a solo player or a random-matchmaking type expecting a populated multiplayer shooter-adjacent experience, the dead lobbies will kill the mood faster than any alien will.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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