GAME REVIEW: MECHASSAULT

I've always been a fan of big mechs. For those of you who have no idea what a "big mech" is, essentially this is a large to gargantuan armor plated fighting machine in the likeness of a man, mythical beast, or animal. Mechs most of the time have two legs for walking around and arms or gun turrets while others look like animals or insects. Some mechs can have a man inside the "cockpit" controlling the mech, or others are autonomous relying on a self aware artificial intelligence. Primarily this whole concept comes from Japan, where cartoon series like Robotech, and Mobile Suit Gundam became very popular. I can remember back to the days when I was a little kid and used to watch Transformers and Voltron on TV, and now that I'm not a kid anymore, I still think mechs are cool. One thing I've noticed is that there are two styles of mech, The Anime Mech, and the American Mech. The Japanese Animation ones usually are very flamboyant, with all kinds of decorations, and have magical powers or can carry a sword and shield like a warrior. American Mechs are most notably characterized with games like Mech Warrior. Usually they have a guy inside controlling the thing with missile pods on the shoulders, and a kind of head mounted on the front of the body, as opposed to a Japanese Anime Mech whose head is on the top of it's body. Even though I like games that have fighting with big mechs, I wasn't all that thrilled to the gills about MechAssault's release, but I was able to get it cheaply for my X-Box ($8.00) and so I played it.

The visuals in MechAssault are right about average, nothing special here, but not horrible. I know the X-Box is capable of more than this, and in fact this game seems not to take full use of what is possible. If I compare this to Z.O.E. another Mech game, the visuals in ZOE are more vibrant and colorful and the mechs were more detailed. In general the entire game takes place on this planet where you see just more and more of the same thing. There are little cities, land, water, snow, lava, etc, but there's nothing to impress you visually. In general the scenery is drab and is just there to destroy. MechAssault's mechs are the American Style that explained above. When you fire a missle it has a smoke trail behind it, you can often see the enemy bases or structures from a pretty good distance, but at a certain distance there is a fog, a sign of half effort in programming and rendering the graphics.

The gameplay is okay to keep you busy, and provide enough challenge. You progress from mission to mission with a set amount of goals that must be achieved during the mission. The enemy mechs are sometimes formidable, and I was wasted more than once in this game. There is no hand to hand combat like some Japanese Mech games, rather you are firing bullets, missiles, and lasers at your opponent until he explodes. You can destroy things around you, in fact you must do this in order to obtain the weapon upgrades. Once you pick your mech you can't change it during the mission unless you waste it. Usually you start out with unlimited standard missiles, lasers, or bullets. If you blow up a bunker and find a weapon upgrade you will get a more powerful version of the particular weapon, but there is a limited supply, and once you run out you return to the weaker version. Unfortunately you can really only get up to 2 upgrades per weapon. Once you try to walk over the 3rd upgrade it will not take it. Also you can not take your upgrades to the next mission, and they are stripped from your mech even if you use the same one for the next mission. I thought that was dumb. Some of the mechs have a booster engine to fly for a short time, heavy mech's don't though. You can not upgrade the booster engine. There are a lot of enemy types from tanks, gun turrets, helicopters, infantry and power armor, and other mechs. One of the best strategies I found was to fire at things that were just at the fringe of the game's draw-in or fog range, and they could never hit you, and you just keep firing away at a turret or another mech until it's destroyed. It is sometimes helpful too to destroy buildings from a distance that are in the way before you go to an area where you know you will be unavoidably attacked by an enemy mech. This helped a lot on the mission where you have to blow up the fusion power plant. There is a multiplayer component to the game where you can battle other mechs via X-Box Link up, which would probably be more fun than the campaign part of the game, but Imagine it would soon become repetitive.

I really can't grade this game with an applicable rating for it's storyline and plot. It's a shooter with your basic goal to complete the mission you are given and kill just about everything in sight. You are part of a mercenary group, and your ship the Icarus crash lands on a planet, and from there certain events happen, there really isn't much backstory or purpose to any of this, other than you must find out why the Word of Blake is on the planet and destroy them before the rest of your side, The Wolf Dragoons, comes. There is usually com chatter at the beginning of the mission about the Word of Blake now and then, but there are no cutscenes about it.

The sounds in the game consist mostly of explosions, guns, and blasting. The buildings explode with a crumpling of metal. There are sounds of shattering glass, steel, and stone. The music mostly consists of what sounds like StarCraft from the PC, and then when there is enemy nearby it changes to this repetative Heavy Metal song with no lyrics. I only noticed a handful of musical pieces in this. Of what there were, these were basically a little below par. The sound effects were okay and appropriate for a game like this and do sound loud if you have a 5.1 Surround Sound.

MechAssault is pretty much a nitche game, and makes a good rental to keep you busy for awhile, but I would only recommend this as a buy if you are the most hardcore shooter-mech gamer looking for another one for you collection. You have to like mech games, maybe play MechWarrior or MechCommander on the PC to dig this, and even those people I think might find this game a little disappointing. My personal preferances lean toward Japanese Anime Mechs in design and abilities but the American Style mechs in this game were okay. There could have been a lot more cool things done with this game if they just would have asked a typical gamer like myself what could make the game more exciting or better. If you're looking for something related to Fighting Mechs a little different from the American Style you might want to try Zone of Enders and Xenosaga for the Playstation 2. There is also Robotech: Battlecry for fans of that cartoon series.

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