MechAssault

MechWarrior has spawned several good games in the past, and at least one great game: MechWarrior 2.  The Glide-enabled version of this game was one of the pinnacles of my early gaming career.  I played through the whole thing at least four times without losing interest.  The whole MechWarrior universe was great, and lent itself to great gameplay.  Since then the universe has been spun in several ways, but MechAssault is clearly a new breed.  Designed from the ground up as a console game, MechAssault streamlines the controls, the missions, and the tactical essence of the MechWarrior universe seamlessly.  While the result is not necessarily a game for everyone, it is an excellent example of how to take only what you need, and ignore what you don’t.

Traditional MechWarrior games use the overall weight of your mech as a benchmark of its power.  A 40 ton mech is simply not as powerful as an 80 ton mech.  Previously, this was enforced as a type of weapons escalation, much like getting new weapons in Quake.  Once you’ve handed someone a rocket launcher, don’t expect them to get excited about a shotgun.  To prove your worthiness in MechWarrior 2, you had to take on big mechs with smaller mechs in personal combat.  If you won despite the inequality of your mechs, you were promoted to a better rank, and started using those new heavier mechs yourself.

MechAssault’s biggest innovation is that they declare all mechs to be equal.  60 ton, 80 ton, 100 ton – they’re all contenders.  Presumably this was done to make the online play spicy – everyone playing 100 ton mechs exclusively just isn’t as much fun as a proper distribution of mechs from all weight classes.  This immediately lends replay to the single player game, because players can use any mech for any mission and have a chance of success.

But how can you make the different mechs balanced in combat?

The secret, in this case, is to dramatically speed up the movement of the weaker mechs.  Smaller has always meant faster, but in the MechWarrior universe speed was generally ability to move between distant nav points quickly, not dodge machine gun fire.  100 ton mechs are still slow and clunky tanks, but the smaller mechs like the Cougar and Puma now boast impressive evasion abilities which allow them to move through many confrontations without a scratch.

The other innovation was to eliminate the concept of ammunition, and instead define weapons purely in terms of damage and refire rate.  This simplification allows for easy controls, which is a plus on any console.  Further simplifying the weapons complexity is the fact that all mechs have exactly three weapons: 1 laser, 1 direct-fire weapon (machine gun, gauss rifle) and 1 missile weapon.  Since all of these weapons have infinite ammo but a noticeable refire delay, seasoned players are constantly switching weapons, to allow for uninterrupted damage-dealing.

In another clever stroke, the developers decided to introduce powerups to the game in the form of armor and ammunition.  This ammunition powers up the appropriate weapon for some number of shots, giving a nice increase in firepower.  Pleasantly, this introduces a bit of strategy into weapons play, because saving your ammo-enhanced weapons for larger targets is very handy.  So rather than simply use maximum firepower at all times, players are rewarded for hoarding certain weapons to get maximum benefit from their powerups.  This appeals to longtime MechWarrior fans, without making any concessions to the simplified ammo-less weapons model.

The single-player missions have nice variety, but are not especially innovative.  Assault the fortress, protect the dropship, rescue the crewmember, scout – we’ve done it all before.  It makes sense not to mess with a working story formula, especially when you’re pulling the rug out from under most of the fundamental gameplay mechanics.

The Graphics in MechAssault are on par with what we’ve been taught to expect from the Xbox.  The environments look fine, and the mechs themselves are sharp.  The buildings are the weak link here – there are never enough of them.  Each building has a few damage states and a canned destruction sequence, but they never came to life for me the way the other visual elements did.  The buildings don’t mesh with the ground in any interesting way, and their destruction shapes are strictly generic.

The weapon effects are pretty sweet – especially during one of the many night missions.  The Gauss Rifles quickly became my favorite weapons in the game simply based on the eye candy they serve with each volley.  Unfortunately there are no impact reactions that I could discern – missiles and lasers simply deal damage to the opponent without any bits of armor blowing off or staggering torso twists.  This one-sided feedback bothered me in tense situations – was my selected weapon getting the job done or not?  At least this kept my eyes in the right place instead of allowing them to wander to the buildings.

Another interesting element of the game which draws cheers from some and boos from others is the environmental interaction.  One mission has you assaulting a fleet of heavy mechs – too many for me to handle on my own.  My solution?  Drop a bridge on them.  Blowing apart a bridge of rock is cool – those are the cheers.  But why are some overhanging ledges destructible and others not?  Why is it that some “ceiling elements” collapse when I pass under them, but not when I shoot them?  I’m being picky here – but if there’s environmental interaction in a game I want it all the way – not just here and there.

Well the voice-overs were decent – certainly not worth complaining about.  Weapon impacts have deep booms associated with them and the footsteps are just where they should be.  A particular coup for the audio has to be the in-game “mission objectives chatter.”  It’s a staple in these sorts of games for at least one mission to go horribly wrong – forcing a late-game change in plans.  All too often the only clue to the player is some terribly-acted script or unintelligible radio chatter.  MechAssault pulls this stunt more than once, and every time it was perfectly clear what had happened and what I had to do.

Does the audio give a sense of scale to these massive machines? – not really.  In fact, the mechs in general seem more like dinosaur-sized machines than office-building sized engines of destruction.  This probably plays back into the increased speed of the game.  Nobody wants to run in slow motion, especially online.

 Mechassault’s biggest selling point is probably its online play.  This is the premier online game for Live, much as SOCOM is for the PS2.  MechAssault is also the poster child for Live’s downloadable content – new mechs and maps have been coming out at a very nice pace.  The online content might even continue to attract new customers until the inevitable sequel rolls around.

Fans of the MechWarrior universe might have the hardest time adjusting to MechAssault’s gameplay.  It’s hard to give up complexity of control and the long-standing weapon roles just to allow newer players into the fold.  Then again, the high production values of MechAssault are hard to ignore.  This might be the game which brings fans of twitch shooters together with the tactical wizards of past Mechwarrior incarnations, which is certainly a win for everybody.