The original Mechassault had a huge following on Xbox Live. After the online demo was bundled with Xbox Live kits, and then the full game that followed, the game had a huge fan base of dedicated online mech players. The developer responded with a vast array of downloadable extras including new maps, game types, and a fresh new lobby. We now have an all-new sequel, featuring new vehicle types, a new campaign mode, and a new online component.
The Campaign mode is a similar affair to the first game, with more (nicely done) cut scenes to flesh out the story and characters. Each level gives you different missions to complete before continuing. Although they do vary slightly, it’s usually a request to blow something up, or destroy an oncoming onslaught of enemy mechs. However, some missions now have you running around on foot without your Mech (or any real protection from attacks for that matter), and you can also climb into your small battle armour suit and fly around the levels shooting enemies with your relatively weedy, but still quite effective laser and mortar weapons. If you’re in your battle suit and see a Mech you’d like to control, you can fly up to it with your jump jets and hack into its defense computer, and if you succeed you’ll be able to dump your battle suit and climb into the mech. During the hacking sequence, a little display comes up on screen and you have to quickly copy the button combinations that light up ala Simon, slowly filling a hacking-progress bar. This is a neat little feature, which works much better than just being able to go up to any mech and jump in it, GTA style. The same system is used online too, so you can fight for your mech against your friends. Along with various Mechs, you also have battle tanks and aircraft that fly around like annoying wasps too, and there are also occasionally friendly VTOLs, which you can use as transport to take you to various places when you’re in the battle suit.
Just like the original game, everything is destructible; buildings, vehicles, trees, walls – everything. It all comes crashing down in a spectacular fashion when attacked by the player. It looks great too, with loads of particle effects being put to good use, and great-looking glass and rubble as buildings fall. Water looks good too, with realistic ripples and lighting. Texturing is generally very nice too, with shiny metallic surfaces that glint here and there, although some of the grass/jungle type areas don’t look quite as crisp as the cityscapes, and the trees in the same area also aren’t quite up to the same standard as the city-based models. You can see a fair distance in front of you, but areas are still fogged or darkened out in the background slightly, which doesn’t ever affect game play, but it would be nice to see a bit further when you’re in a huge open area. The sense of scale is fantastic though, especially when you’re running around on foot, and you have huge Mechs stomping around and sky scrapers surrounding you. You realise how tiny you are in comparison to the huge Mechs.
I shouldn’t like it, but somehow the Korn and Papa Roach soundtrack worked in the game, with heavy guitar thrashing going on as you’re battling through levels. Quite an unusual choice of music, but I quite liked it, and never turned it down whilst playing.
Controls are similar to the first game, with a few new additions. You can now grab onto walls by pressing ‘A’ (which is handy when your thrusters run out when trying to climb a wall or building whilst in Battle Armor). The camera is still set in a third-person perspective, which works well, but a couple more options, including a in-mech view would be welcome to give players a bit more choice. The tanks in the game however, although control quite well, have no real feel to them, and are far too light for a chunk of metal that would be a few hundred tonnes in weight. And they have trouble getting up the simplest of hills and banks too, which is odd for a huge tank with caterpillar tracks. Flying around is awkward too, and you can’t seem to control the planes how you’d like to. Climbing and diving for example just feels difficult to pull off, and you end up just wanting to get out and back into a Mech again.
Even with all these new bells and whistles, MechAssault 2 is a fairly simple game. The missions are very basic and short, and the combat is also very simplified in structure: Kill a mech, get some health (armour pods dropped from destroyed Mechs act as health-ups) and ammo (weapon pods drop off too), kill another one get some more health and so on. The game never really taxes you in its missions, and although the difficulty level does rise, it's never anything more than having to shoot something more times than you did in the last level. There is nothing wrong with this, but it does make the game a bit shallow and it doesn’t require much thinking or skill to progress.
Some of the game’s features feel tacked-on for the sake of it, particularly the sections when you get out of your Mech and are running around. You have no weapons like rocket launchers or grenades to attack Mechs with, you just have an inventory of proximity bombs that you can also arm and blow up remotely. These sections are nice, but almost seem pointless when half the time it’s just to flick a switch to open a door. The sequel hasn’t really done anything new over the previous game either, apart from adding a few new vehicles and features; it’s more like an expansion pack than a full-on sequel, the trouble is it has the full-on sequel price tag.
The online multiplayer part of the game is good fun, although again there isn’t much to it, and with many more Xbox Live games around today like Rainbow Six and Halo 2, I don’t think anyone but major fans of the first game will stick with it for very long. There just isn’t enough to keep you or your clan’s interest up, and once you have played a couple of maps you’ve pretty much seen everything it has to offer. It’s good, but not quite good enough as Xbox Live games go.
Mech Assault 2: Lone Wolf is a nice game, and fans of the original will love this and surely play it for months, but for anyone wanting a bit more depth and complexity from this long-awaited sequel might come away disappointed. Its not a bad game by any means, quite the opposite in fact. Its just rather simple and lacks depth, and not quite the game it could or should have been.
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