Nemesis: Lockdown Review - Hostile Mars, New Challenges

Terrifying horror and omnipresent death descend upon a quiet corporate colony on Mars. Survivors are in danger, and new heroes rise to face the base's pitfalls, power outages, corporate machinations, tough decisions, and, of course, a new enemy. Welcome to Nemesis: Lockdown.

Nemesis: Lockdown is a standalone sequel to the original Nemesis game released in 2018. For those unfamiliar with the original, it is a semi-cooperative survival horror game for 1-5 players set aboard the titular spaceship, Nemesis. Players take on the roles of crew members suddenly awakened from hibernation to face a ship full of unknown aliens, system failures, and difficult moral choices, often driven by hidden corporate agendas. As an individual, you must deal with the current situation on the ship, and your actions and decisions can significantly impact the game for other players.

How do you play Nemesis?

Will you play cooperatively, explore the ship together, and try to survive as a group? Or will you stay loyal to the corporation, fulfill your orders (perhaps you'll be tasked with obtaining an enemy larva sample), or ensure that some disobedient crew members don't survive? The gameplay is non-linear and delivers a truly atmospheric experience in every session. If you were to write down one game, it would make for a fantastic sci-fi short story. Moreover, the grim and oppressive atmosphere on the ship evokes feelings similar to watching the movie Alien, which largely inspired the game's creators. And it works damn well.

Since the first release of Nemesis, several crowdfunding campaigns have taken place, bringing with them a number of expansions. You can add different alien races, events, and even new characters or an entire research team to the game. It is possible to play solo, purely cooperatively, or you can play as the aliens, play a shortened epilogue, or even a cooperative campaign supported by a great story.

You have to pack the entire game with expansions, the full set of miniatures, and other accessories like a neoprene playmat or various 3D-printed add-ons into a really large suitcase (or one big IKEA bag :-) ). Thanks to Mindok, Nemesis is also available completely in Czech, so anyone who is drawn to this great game can play it. This excludes the Aftermath expansion, which is the only one that remained a Kickstarter Exclusive.

Nemesis: Lockdown Sequel

Nemesis: Lockdown follows the original game with a new group of characters. This time, it's not on a spaceship, but in a facility located on a colonized Mars. There, survivors discover a new enemy, and the entire facility goes into lockdown. I also like to imagine Lockdown as a canonical sequel to one of the possible endings of Nemesis.

Nemesis: Lockdown is a standalone game, so you don't need anything from the previous game or its expansions to play it. It brings two new game boards, a new group of characters, new cards and events, a new enemy, and, of course, new gameplay elements and mechanics that further deepen the great system from the original Nemesis. Just like in the original game, players choose their role at the beginning. This time, you have the Survivor, Hacker, Xenobiologist, Guard, Janitor, and Subject X at your disposal.

Each player receives all the game material associated with their chosen character: a player board, a deck of action cards, starting items, objectives, and a miniature. The game board features a map of the base's rooms and corridors, cleverly depicted across several floors/sections, and also adds outdoor areas of the harsh Martian surface, which you can traverse in a spacesuit or a rover. The alternative side of the game board offers more opportunities to move around the exterior and experience situations outside the base. For players with experience from the original Nemesis, the Lockdown game system won't feel too different.

How do you play Nemesis: Lockdown?

The game itself is played over a maximum of 15 rounds. In each round, players take turns as long as they are able to perform actions. Possible actions include movement, combat, trading, or using room actions and playing cards from their hand, which are also used to pay for all actions. Your hand of cards gradually depletes, and a player usually performs no more than 3-4 actions in one round. Similar to the original game, players often roll for noise and can immediately get into trouble or come under attack by the aliens themselves, who hide skillfully in the depths of the service shafts. Once all players pass, it's time for events, movement, and actions related to the aliens, which can include combat, movement, or even evolution.

The new enemies – Night Stalkers – are ruthless aliens that use darkness and shadows and won't let players rest for a moment. They usually appear at moments when players are dealing with something else besides the aliens, often something like electricity. Yes, a new mechanic in the game introduces power outages, so some sections and rooms will be without power, which gives an advantage to the aforementioned Night Stalkers. Players will have to solve the dilemma together: whether to move in the dark or find a generator as quickly as possible to restore power to some sections. In sections with restored electricity, some rooms can be used to fight hordes of aliens more easily. However, the wiring is damaged, and energy will rapidly deplete throughout the game. Darkness is coming.

Just like in Nemesis, at the beginning of Lockdown, players receive two objectives - corporate and personal. These objectives, besides mere survival, serve as the players' goals. During the game, players will have to choose which objective they will try to fulfill and base their strategy on it. Personal objectives are usually the morally better ones and include, for example, destroying the nest, killing the queen, sending a signal to Earth, or surviving together with other players. Corporate objectives, the morally worse ones, involve securing alien samples, betraying one of the survivors, or even all of them, and killing their characters using game mechanics.

In Nemesis, surviving doesn't mean winning

The winner is only the one who survives and also fulfills their objective. Your moral compass may not always be the indicator of which objective you choose. Your current situation and the need to decide who you can trust and who you can't might decide that for you. Maybe no one. Just like in Nemesis, the game offers several ways to survive. In the case of Lockdown, these are the isolation chamber, the bunker, and launching in a pod. The course of events will eventually make some survival methods impossible, and often you won't have much of a choice. To save yourself at all, you will have to run through the entire base full of enemies and traitors.

In addition to the two mentioned victory conditions—survival and objective fulfillment—Nemesis Lockdown adds one more control mechanism: “What will the corporation do to you (all) if you have survived and fulfilled your objective?” There are 7 termination orders in the game, and one of them is selected at the beginning of the game. The rest are distributed to players or placed on the game board. The goal of the players is to use the process of elimination to find out what will be triggered by the drawn order. There are many ways to achieve this in the game.

This is another element that players must keep track of. Because when the corporation decides to kill everyone who survived in the bunker and you happen to be in it, even if you have fulfilled your objective, you will still perish and not win the game. This adds more distrust and risky decisions to the game. Overall, it is harder to win, but that makes it all the more fun.

What is different in Lockdown?

Lockdown also improves some of the original Nemesis game mechanics. A common opinion among Nemesis players was that researching alien weaknesses was quite complicated and often difficult to progress in a given game. The alien board has been redesigned into a Laboratory board, and the first alien weakness is already known to all players. However, for players to use it against the aliens, they must gain knowledge of the environment and the enemy. This knowledge is often dependent on the specific role type, and many opportunities to acquire it arise during the game. The other two alien weaknesses, however, must be researched by players in the classic way in the laboratory room.

Apart from the aforementioned rule adjustments and game elements, the gameplay is more or less similar to the great Nemesis. The game brings many critical situations, twists, and playing your own character is even a bit more intense than in the original game. However, it also brings more things that the player must keep track of, and the game is generally harder. So, for those uninitiated in Nemesis, I recommend playing a few games of the original first so that everything settles in and gets under your skin.

Nemesis Lockdown is again published by Mindok in Czech and this time it is completely comprehensive. It is therefore possible to buy the Chytridi expansion and accessories containing Kickstarter stretch goals; these add a new alien race, miniature replacements for some tokens, a game campaign, and other gameplay options to expand and improve the game itself.

Moreover, Lockdown allows owners of the previous Nemesis to use some elements from the original game. You can play with all five alien races, with the original characters, or with the characters from Aftermath. Alternatively, you can swap alternative events and mix the game however you like. For some rules and additional material to connect both games, it is necessary to purchase the Chytridi expansion and accessories.

The Nemesis family of games is a gem among semi-cooperative games. It manages to convey the atmosphere and feelings of survivors in a terrifying location with a horrific enemy, and it works really well. The game system is truly fun, offers great replayability, and with many expansions, it also brings interesting variability. I like to say that Nemesis Lockdown is to James Cameron's Aliens what the original Nemesis was to Ridley Scott's Alien. Both are great, dark horror sci-fi, but at the same time, each is different in its own way.

author Honza Kohoutek