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.

Bigger and Better

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.

Photograph: Matt Kamen

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.

Up and Downgrades

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. Disappointingly, there’s also no quick-suspend feature, forcing you to power off fully and back on between play sessions.

Photograph: Matt Kamen

There are some upgrades to the underlying tech, though. One material improvement is the battery, which jumped to a 5,000-mAh cell from the EXP’s 3,000 mAh. Even with that bigger, brighter screen sucking up juice, the Nexus offers around five hours of play between charges, roughly an hour longer. On the audio front, the integrated front-facing stereo speakers are solid, offering louder, clearer output. Even better, the Nexus now supports Bluetooth, finally allowing you to connect wireless headphones, while still offering a 3.5-mm jack for wired headsets.

Bluetooth isn’t the only connectivity upgrade. The Nexus now supports the Wi-Fi 6 standard and can connect to 5-GHz networks (previous models could only use slower 2.4-GHz ones). That’s useful for downloading console updates and Evercade’s free Game of the Month. It also enables the new EverSync feature, unique to the Nexus, which allows multiple units to communicate wirelessly. Much like Nintendo’s GameShare, it’s set to allow multiplayer across devices even with only one cartridge, although I haven’t been able to test this feature yet.

The underlying OS also gets a refresh. Hop into the settings menu and you’ll find new customization tools. These let you adjust the color palette for the menu background and the glowing LED Nexus logo, select onscreen borders for non-widescreen games, and even tweak aspect ratios and virtual scan lines—all nice ways to personalize your device.

The glaring omission is any form of TV connectivity. Previous handheld Evercades featured a mini-HDMI out port, but that’s removed entirely here. It was always a nice-to-have rather than a major selling point, but it’s disappointing to lose a feature. Evercade players wanting TV play will have to opt for the Evercade VS-R set-top console.

A New Era for Old Games

While the Nexus hardware is a significant improvement, more exciting is where the games themselves may be heading. Almost every game on Evercade to date has been from the 8-bit or 16-bit era, if not earlier, a period that near-universally consisted of 2D titles. Adding thumbsticks opens the door to an entirely new generation of 3D games. Blaze says the Nexus works with 32- and 64-bit games, which dramatically expands possibilities for future releases.

Photograph: Matt Kamen

More impressively, the first two cartridges to benefit from this generational leap also see Evercade step beyond emulation for the first time. Both the Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie double-pack and the DOOM and DOOM II collection are natively ported. That means improved performance, intentional widescreen aspect ratios to match the display, higher resolutions up to 60 frames per second, and on-cartridge save slots rather than virtual quick saves.

The Banjo duology is the real standout so far, with the colorful worlds of Rare’s classic 3D platformers shining on the Nexus’ superior screen while taking full advantage of the dual thumbsticks (something the N64 controller lacked) to offer smoother camera controls alongside free movement. These are authentic and accessible versions of 64-bit gaming greatness, without compromise. This might be the best way to play this pair of games, period, and all the better for being able to do so portably. (For anyone who’s looked up the price of a Banjo-Tooie cart on the secondary market, a bargain, too.) The DOOM collection also holds up well, with classic boomer shooters and a stack of bonus missions and map packs, but as some of the oldest examples of first-person shooters, they show their age more.

The ports are to Evercade as an ecosystem, meaning the cartridges will still play on existing hardware—even Blaze’s budget Super Pocket devices—with camera controls mapped to shoulder buttons, albeit with a slower rotational view. It also partly explains the lack of power upgrades for the Nexus, as cross-device compatibility is a signature of the collection. Still, as Blaze works its way through gaming history, it feels as though a future Evercade will inevitably have to make a break to offer more power and support more recent games.

For now, though, the Nexus is hands-down the best way to play both Evercade’s vast library of games and this new pseudo-generation of native releases. With its better screen, bigger form, and added controls for 3D games, it’s a delight to play on. If Blaze can keep up the momentum with more dedicated ports, this will be a bright new age for the best old games.