Nexuiz focuses on bringing the FPS genre back to the basics with quick, lethal battles and balanced weaponry. As of the current release there are 9 weapons and 24 official maps, as well as 15 player models, with an average of 2 skins each.

While Nexuiz is not intended to be an eye-candy laden game, it does feature many advanced effects such as coronas, bloom, Realtime World and Dynamic Lighting and shadowing, shaders (with OpenGL 2.0), offset mapping, and High dynamic range rendering. All these effects can be turned off to make the game run on older hardware. Nexuiz has such a range of effects that enabling all of them would result in an unplayable experience, apart from on the most cutting-edge of hardware.