Developer Housemarque has shared in a blog post some new features in their upcoming high-energy top-down shooter Nex Machina, giving new information on the game’s season structure, in-game challenges, and replay functionality.  They’ve also shared a developer video/interview walking through some of the features, which you can see below:

As explained in the video, Nex Machina will feature “seasons” of gameplay, in addition to the standard arcade and level modes, in order to foster a more competitive environment for players.  During a season, players can gain experience points and Season Coins, rank up, and compete against other players on leaderboards.  Seasons will also feature their own unique set of  challenges, making the gameplay of each season more skill-based and memorably different from others.  The length of seasons is not currently specified by Housemarque, who merely state that it could be “weeks or months”.

Challenges will be the way Nex Machina lets players tailor the game experience to their own specific desires or difficulty preferences.  Many of the defining parameters of gameplay in Nex Machina will be alterable, letting players ramp up the game speed or give enemies stronger attacks in order to add new layers of challenge and reactiveness to their gaming experience.

Nex Machina‘s Replay Mode has been built primarily for the community, letting players study the way others tackle difficult levels and learn what makes them so effective, sharing techniques and methods for success.  Replays will be attached to all entries on the game’s leaderboards, allowing easy access to select a high-ranking leader’s game and watch how it went down.

On Replay Mode, Housemarque had the following to say:

We are quite proud that Nex Machina is very demanding game since it requires a lot of skillful playing. There are a lot of secrets, a lot of things to uncover and a lot of depth in the scoring system.

Because of all of these layers you could otherwise end up with a lot of unanswered questions, but Instead of having players to google [sic] and search answers from there, we’d really like to encourage the extension of the experience to be integrated into the game.

Nex Machina will be available sometime later this year on PlayStation 4, as well as on PC via Steam.