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Evercade Nexus Review: The Best Retro Handheld Yet
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Specialist hardware manufacturer Blaze Entertainment has spent the 2020s quietly carving out a niche for itself as the go-to option for retro gaming. With a stable of reliable hardware, from the original Evercade handheld to the Evercade Alpha bartop arcade cabinet, it offers numerous ways to play, all built around an ever-expanding library of physical cartridges. Each brings a curated selection of classic titles and lost curiosities to modern players.
The Evercade Nexus is more than just the latest addition to its console lineup. While it retains compatibility with every previously released Evercade cartridge, it’s also the biggest leap forward the line has taken so far, both in hardware and in what it might offer with games going forward. It’s a real level up—and it’s rather brilliant.
The most obvious change is the sheer size. Where Blaze’s previous handhelds were about on par with the original Game Boy Advance, aimed at pocketable play, the Evercade Nexus is closer in scale to a Nintendo Switch Lite. It measures 215 x 111 x 34 millimeters and weighs 410 grams—still easily portable, but more in the “buy a protective hard case and throw it in your bag” kind of way.
The size increase works in its favor, though. The larger design feels more substantial, with more real estate for your hands for better comfort. The control layout remains broadly the same as the Evercade EXP—a D-pad, ABXY face buttons, shoulder buttons, and triggers all return, with a few beneficial tweaks. Notably, the triggers are now chunkier and curved to meet your fingers, while all four shoulder inputs and the rear of the device are now nicely textured for better grip.
The big change is the addition of twin symmetrical thumbsticks. This has implications for Evercade going forward—more on that later—but it also improves Tate Mode (pronounced tah-tay, meaning vertical in Japanese), a returning feature from the Evercade EXP. As on that model, tapping the dedicated mode-shift button rotates the screen 90 degrees, letting you play vertically scrolling arcade games in the intended orientation, rather than crammed into a tiny pillar-boxed view on the widescreen display.
On the EXP, you’d hold the console on the left to use the D-pad for movement, which required duplicate A+B buttons on that side and cluttered the inputs. On the Nexus, Tate Mode rotates in the opposite direction, letting you use the right-hand thumbstick and the default ABXY buttons. It feels much better—again aided by the increased overall size—and keeps the device's design looking much tidier.
Whichever orientation you play in, the screen is bigger—a 5.89-inch IPS panel with an 840 × 512-pixel resolution for a 167 pixels-per-inch density, versus the original's 4.3-inch LCD—and brighter, now boasting 500-plus nits. It’s clear and colorful, and games look fantastic on it.
The only minor build-quality demerits are the D-pad, which feels a little too raised and prone to rocking—a slightly more flush fit would have been better—and the glossy finish under the face buttons and around the front trim. These accents are aesthetically pleasing, standing out from the matte plastic of the rest of the unit, but they attract micro-scratches far too easily. Those small gripes aside, the Nexus is a huge improvement on its predecessors, feeling less like a quirky gadget and more like a serious, modern gaming handheld.
The Nexus doesn’t actually see any boosts in processor power or memory. It still uses the 1.5-GHz quad-core chip in the EXP with 512 MB of RAM. That may not sound like much in 2026, but it’s significantly more powerful than the original hardware it emulates, and it ensures Evercade’s universal cross-device compatibility for every cartridge.
The downside is that the Nexus still feels slow at the system level. Booting it up takes about 35 to 40 seconds on average, and it can take about the same to load up a cartridge. Games don't have any performance issues, but getting there is sluggish. Disa