| Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion | |||
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| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion Review Overview
What is Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion?
Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion is the forthcoming sequel to the 2019 action game Daemon X Machina. Produced by Kenichiro Tsukuda and developed by Marvelous’ First Studio, the game is scheduled for release on September 5, 2025, across multiple platforms, including PC via Steam, the Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Developed by Marvelous First Studio with Kenichiro Tsukuda returning as producer and featuring mechanical designs by Shoji Kawamori, it was officially announced during the Marvelous Games Showcase in May 2023.
Under the oppressive regime of the Sovereign Axiom, humanity in Titanic Scion battles for survival against the regime's forces and the organic-mechanical creatures named Immortals. As a Reclaimer piloting customizable exosuit-style mechs called Arsenals, players battle the Axiom’s tyranny, push back the Immortal threat, and help ignite humanity’s resistance.
Titanic Scion retains the series’ signature high-speed, air-and-ground combat while introducing more customization and exploration mechanics. Players can mix and match weapon parts, body components, and visual designs by salvaging, crafting, or looting gear. When it comes to combat, players can expect melee combos, ranged weapons (like bows and lances), and boss fights against colossal enemies. Plus, players can jump into co-op with up to three players.
Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion features:
⚫︎ Open-World Map
⚫︎ More Arsenal and Pilot Customization
⚫︎ New Combat Mechanics
⚫︎ Co-Op and Asynchronous Multiplayer
⚫︎ Looting and Developing
⚫︎ Has Mini-Games like the Overbullet Card Game
⚫︎ High-Speed Mecha Action Gameplay
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion’s gameplay and story.
 Steam |
 PlayStation |
 Xbox |
 Switch 2 |
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| Price | $69.99 | ||||||||||
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Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Seemingly Endless Customization Options Flying Around in an Arsenal is Fun Combat is Faster and Weightier |
Frame Drops on the Switch 2 are Bad Serviceable Story at Best Predictable Story Beats |
Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion Story - 7/10
Titanic Scion takes the familiar mercenary-versus-machine backdrop and pushes it into more ambitious territory, threading its missions with a sharper sense of purpose than the first game ever managed. The cast of pilots is colorful enough to keep things lively, their rivalries and alliances giving the world just enough friction to feel alive. That said, these characters are still stuck in their own tropes, and I can't help but feel that story is there just to be an excuse for the big mecha fights. Still, it nails the mecha-anime swagger and melodrama that makes strapping into an Arsenal look and feel cool.
Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion Gameplay - 10/10
Flying an Arsenal in Titanic Scion feels electric. They’re fast, weighty, and endlessly customizable, whether you’re min-maxing stats for efficiency or bolting on parts just because they look cool. The open-world design encourages you to explore it, and I found myself happily lost in tunnels and Axiom facilities long after I should’ve been pushing the story forward. Even the fights are exhilarating, as I often had to think of various ways to counter my opponents’ builds.
Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion Visuals - 7/10
Titanic Scion trades in the heavier cel-shading of its predecessor for a sleeker, more anime-like style that wouldn’t look out of place beside Xenoblade Chronicles. The Arsenals glint with detail, while the open areas look good enough to justify wandering off-mission just to take them in. It’s striking work, even if the illusion cracks when big fights drop the framerate into the 20s—hardly ideal for a game built on fast reactions and sharper-than-sharp movement. It’s not horrendously bad on the Switch 2, but swarms of enemies can tank that framerate down quick.
Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion Audio - 9/10
The voice cast delivers just as strongly here as in the first game, with no one phoning it in and every pilot sounding distinct enough to cut through the fights. Arsenals hum and whir and slam with a mechanical weight that makes every movement feel good. Combat is underscored by a guitar-heavy soundtrack that keeps pace with everything going on during fights. However, as strong as the game’s audio is, I did run into a few odd moments where the battle music wouldn’t stop even after returning to base. It’s not game-breaking, but it is jarring enough to break the immersion.
Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion Value for Money - 9/10
At $70, Titanic Scion sits comfortably in the modern triple-A price bracket, and while the main story taps out around 30 hours, it never feels like you’re getting shortchanged. The sheer amount of side content, from exploring abandoned facilities to tinkering with builds until they’re borderline absurd, stretches that runtime well past the campaign. It’s not the cheapest mecha game out there, but it's a hell of a good time.
Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion Overall Score - 84/100
Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion is at its best when you’re soaring across wide-open battlefields and customizing your Arsenal to absurd extremes. The new look fits the series like a glove, and it makes every mech and environment feel larger than life. The Switch 2 version can’t always keep up, dropping frames when the action’s getting good, but it rarely dulls the thrill of a good fight. It’s an exhilarating and tinkerable mech playground, one I couldn’t put down even when I probably should have.
Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion Review: Switch 2 Can’t Quite Keep Up With This Arsenal
I’ve been around the block with mecha action games long enough to know that you don’t get many great ones these days. Every now and then, a studio takes a swing at making one, but more often than not, the result falls somewhere in the middle. Case in point, my first time with Daemon X Machina back on the Switch. It was one of the earliest games I picked up for the system, and I sunk a good chunk of time into it because, well, it sort of scratched the itch. However, I can admit that it was basically a watered-down Armored Core 4 with lesser build variety, and its multiplayer scene dried up almost as fast as it appeared.
That didn’t stop me from losing my mind when Marvelous announced Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion during the 2023 Marvelous Games Showcase. By the time it resurfaced during the Nintendo Switch 2 Direct earlier this year, I was already mentally clearing my backlog for it. The franchise had been biding its time for years, largely overshadowed by FromSoftware’s return to the throne with Armored Core 6 in 2023, but here was proof that Marvelous wasn’t ready to mothball its fledgling mech series. They had another shot, and I wanted to believe they’d learned something from their first outing.
That belief paid off. Titanic Scion is a sequel that not only fixes its predecessors' mistakes but also completely reshapes its core gameplay. I can say, without a doubt, despite its issues on the Switch 2, that this is the most fun I've had with a mech action game in a long time.
It Has Better Story and Characters than the First Game At Least
Titanic Scion opens with what I can only call a titanic start. You wake up in captivity, only to be busted out by Nerve, a fellow Outer who, like you, carries the rare biological affinity for Femto, which is an energy source that’s the backbone of civilization. It powers mechs, weapons, and pretty much everything that keeps humans working in the Blue Planet. That affinity, though, is a double-edged sword. It makes Outers the best pilots around, but it also sets them apart in the worst way possible. For most ordinary humans who migrated to the Blue Planet after the Earth’s collapse, Outers are freaks of nature.
The political backdrop doesn’t help much either. The Blue Planet is under the iron thumb of the Sovereign Axiom, a regime of Outers who lean into their superior abilities and rule through force. If you’re an ordinary human stuck under their boot, you either bend the knee or join the resistance group known as the Reclaimers. That’s the world you’re thrown into as you barely escape the Outers who want to experiment on you. It’s messy and hostile, but I appreciate that the game drops you in medias res. After a jailbreak and a mech battle or two, you are given a long infodump to tell you that you’re in the middle of a conflict much larger than yourself.
After this, the story itself becomes serviceable at best. The game introduces its cast soon after the escape sequence, and while they’re often built off familiar character tropes, they’re, at the very least, not devoid of personality. Ash, for example, makes an immediate impression with his contempt for you as an Outer. He dislikes you and goes out of his way to mock you, even in battle. He can be annoying, and the people around him make it known, but the game makes his attitude understandable. When the world has been warped by the Sovereign Axiom’s rule, when your family and friends live in constant fear of Femto-corrupted mutants known as Immortals, and when the people in power wield the same abilities you resent, of course you’re going to take it out on the one standing right next to you.
The Immortals themselves add another wrinkle. The Reclaimers fight not just against the Axiom, but also against these creatures that represent the consequences of leaning too heavily on the very energy resource everyone depends on.
Where Titanic Scion improves over its predecessor is in how it gives its characters more to work on. Unlike the first game, they are not anymore just one-note mercenaries or stock anime personalities. They have scars, grudges, and people they care about. Even side characters who only pop up for a few missions are written with just enough grounding to feel like part of the larger world. It’s not high art, and I'm not exactly crying over their emotional beats later in the game, but compared to the original’s even more generic cast, it’s a decent step forward.
Building the Perfect Arsenal
Titanic Scion’s gameplay is far, far removed from the first Daemon X Machina. Yes, you’re still piloting an Arsenal, but gone are the gundam-like robots of old. This time, the Arsenal is more of an exo-suit designed to keep you alive against the Immortals that roam the wastelands. It sounds like a downgrade, but these suits feel grounded and more dangerous in ways the floaty giants of the first game never did.
Weight is the central idea. Every piece of gear you strap on affects how your Arsenal moves, reacts, and even how much it can carry. Builds fall broadly into three weight classes: lightweight, midweight, and heavyweight. That should sound familiar to anyone who’s touched a mech game in the last two decades. A lightweight frame is nimble and blessed with stronger laser defenses, perfect for closing distances or zipping out of a fight before the enemy can lock on you. However, push the weight limit with too many weapons and you’ll be slower than the heavyweight Arsenals. Heavyweight frames, on the other hand, thrive on sheer bulk. They soak up damage with a high Vitality Point (VP) pool and carry weapons that can turn Immortals into dust in seconds, though they’re about as graceful as a refrigerator. Midweights, unsurprisingly, are at the middle ground.
These weight-classes change how you read the battlefield. Even the act of jumping in a lightweight frame carries a moment of lag before you regain balance. It sounds minor, but it sells the illusion that you’re piloting an armored body.
This weight system becomes the backbone for an expansive customization suite. During most of my playthrough, I leaned on a lightweight build with a laser sword in one hand, a stun blade in the other, and an auxiliary module that let me dash without draining Femto. It was a rush—literally—closing gaps in seconds, slashing away, and peeling back before my target could retaliate. But the same build that let me bully slower enemies left me hopeless against bosses with equal speed and bigger guns. Getting shredded by someone who couldn't care less about my swords forced me back to the hangar. I swapped to a heavyweight Arsenal, slapped on two bazookas and a laser shield, and suddenly I was an immovable object. It felt clunky compared to the lightweight, but it forced me to adapt, to approach encounters differently.
Customization fundamentally alters how you interact with every fight. Armor, weapons, attachments that tweak resistances and stats—all of these can be scavenged from downed enemies or developed back at base. The loop of experimentation, failure (especially if you’re in higher difficulties), and reinvention is constant, and it’s a big part of my adoration for this game.
Plus, if your suit ends up a Frankenstein mess of mismatched parts, you can override the look to mimic a unified armor style without sacrificing your cobbled-together stats. Decals, paint jobs, color sliders—it’s all here, the little rituals of personalization that mech fans expect.
Things get even more interesting with the Fusion system, which lets you tinker not just with your Arsenal's weapon skills, but also with your own body. By splicing your body with Femto mutations, you can unlock abilities like creating decoys, camouflaging, and auto-dodging. These abilities burn your stamina faster, and your character will slowly take on a more mutated appearance. I have no doubt, though, that many fans will spend hours min-maxing their builds with this system. Just be careful, as removing a mutation will cost a large amount of money, so be sure you're committed to your choices.
A Vast Open World That’s Fun to Fly Around in
One of the boldest departures Titanic Scion makes from its predecessor is the jump to a proper open world. The first game toyed with big, boxed-in arenas where missions played out, but here Marvelous gives you the freedom to go wherever you please in your Arsenal. Between story beats, you’re let loose in large areas filled with roaming enemies, field bosses, and oddities tucked away in corners that practically beg to be investigated. Instead of being ushered from one contained fight to the next, you now set your own pace, choosing whether to gun straight toward the objective or get sidetracked by whatever mechanical monstrosity happens to be stomping around in the distance.
That freedom can be intoxicating. I’ll admit, I lost hours in the early game just poking around. Forget main missions; if something on the horizon looked suspicious, I was already halfway there. Sometimes, it was a few Reclaimers fending off a bunch of Immortals. Sometimes it was a towering field boss that steamrolled me on the first attempt but had me grinning all the same. The initial area is wide, and the other locations are just as vast.
Of course, with a map this big, the obvious question is how do you get around without the whole thing feeling like a commute? On foot, your Arsenal is nimbler than its bulk suggests, and thanks to streamlined movement design, you’re not trudging from point A to point B anymore. But you’ve got other options. You can also burn Femto energy to take your Arsenal airborne and just soar over canyons, forests, and ruins.
Riding a horse or motorcycle in your Arsenal is an option, but you'll be slipping and sliding all over the place due to the rough terrain. I didn't even bother with them because it feels much faster and easier to just boost around. There are plenty of Femto crystals and trees that regenerate Femto energy quickly, and you also regenerate energy while standing still, so you never have to worry about running out.
What surprised me was how the slower pace of exploration actually benefited the game. The combat, as I’ve already mentioned, is a buffet of stats, systems, and build tinkering that can be overwhelming in bursts. The open world, by comparison, lets you breathe. Fetching resources, clearing out smaller skirmishes, or just scouting the map gives you time to get comfortable with your setup. It’s not as pulse-pounding as the boss fights, but the downtime helps the louder moments hit harder.
Of course, this is still an open-world game, so fast travel exists. But it isn’t just handed to you. Each travel point needs to be unlocked. Sometimes, you don’t have to do anything beyond just going there. Other times, it has to be unlocked by completing a small objective, like defeating all the Immortals surrounding the area, which adds a bit of friction to what would otherwise be a standard convenience.
This open world also packs in a handful of minigames that, while hardly the deepest diversions, do a solid job of breaking up the loop of flying and fighting Immortals. You can race around in your Arsenal or on a motorcycle, compete against tough opponents in the Coliseum, and there’s even a short card game called Overbullet. It’s not exactly Gwent-level in terms of impact, but it works well enough as a quick distraction after hours of grinding bosses for materials.
Looks Good; Plays Poorly on the Switch 2
On the Switch 2, the game’s visuals look great. The environments are massive stretches of alien terrain, sometimes bleak, sometimes beautiful, but always worth stopping to take in. Whether you’re cresting a ridge to see a ruined city swallowed by sand, or ducking into natural tunnels where neon veins of Femto energy pulse through the stone, there’s a sense of scale that the first game never quite reached. It helps that the Arsenals themselves are amazing in their own right. Their plating catches light in motion and their joints whir and glow. I actually found myself pausing between fights just to rotate the camera and watch the suit reflect the horizon.
What makes this even more notable is how far the series has come visually. The first Daemon X Machina leaned into cel-shaded style that gave it a comic-book look, but also made it look flatter. Titanic Scion ditches that for a more anime-inspired aesthetic closer to something like Xenoblade Chronicles X or 3.
However, for all that polish, performance tells a very different story. On the Switch 2, whether docked or handheld, the framerate rarely feels consistent. Most of the time, you’re hovering in the 30-40fps range, which is playable enough. But the moment six or more enemies join the fray, or when a giant boss floods the screen with particle effects, things can dip into the 20s. Those drops hurt, especially in a game that’s built around high-speed mech fights. They’re noticeable enough that, when running my lightweight build, I stopped relying on dodging manually. My inputs simply weren’t landing in time. Instead, I opted to use the auto-dodge skill during more difficult fights.
For anyone who has played a ported game on a Nintendo console, frame drops and a 30fps experience are nothing new. Although the Switch 2's portability is a huge plus, it's a shame that it likely won't be the definitive way to play Titanic Scion. The game will probably look and feel much better on more powerful platforms like PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
Is Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion Worth It?
Yes, Frame Drops and All
Despite the frame drops that occasionally tripped me up, I found myself enjoying Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion far more than I expected. I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I spent the past couple of nights glued to the screen, sacrificing sleep in the name of tinkering with builds and clearing out one more natural tunnel, one more Axiom facility, one more boss fight before bed. The early and mid-game had me wandering like a tourist in a strange land, poking at every corner just to see what might be tucked away. By the time the late game rolled around, my Arsenal had become so overbuilt that story bosses often crumpled under its weight. I personally didn’t mind it, but part of the fun is in going overboard, just to see how far the systems let you push them.
Of course, indulgence doesn’t come cheap. At $70, this is very much priced alongside the big players in the industry, and while the main storyline will likely only take you around 20 to 30 hours, it’s everything orbiting that narrative that stretches the experience into something more fun. The customization menu itself can feel like a rabbit hole you fall into willingly. And if that’s not enough, the game throws open its hangar doors to online play, letting you drop in with up to three other pilots to tackle story missions or raid bosses.
The game has its flaws, sure, but when you’re soaring above ruined cityscapes in your customized Arsenal, frame rate hiccups and all, it’s hard not to feel like the pilot of your own mecha anime. And that feeling, more than anything else, is why I kept coming back.
| Steam |
PlayStation |
Xbox |
Switch 2 |
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| Price | $69.99 | ||||||||||
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Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion FAQ
Is There a Demo for Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion?
Yes, a demo for Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion is available now. Announced at Gamescom 2025, the demo can be downloaded on all platforms and includes the first nine chapters, open-world exploration, online co-op, and cross-play support. Players can also transfer their progress to the full game.
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Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion Product Information
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| Title | DAEMON X MACHINA: TITANIC SCION |
|---|---|
| Release Date | September 5, 2025 |
| Developer | Marvelous First Studio |
| Publisher | Marvelous Games XSEED Games |
| Supported Platforms | PC (via Steam) PlayStation 5 Nintendo Switch 2 Xbox Series X|S |
| Genre | Action, Mecha |
| Number of Players | Online Co-Op (up to 4 players) Online PvP (1v1 or 2v2) |
| ESRB Rating | ESRB Teen |
| Official Website | Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion Website |
