For months now, I’ve been under the impression thatMecha Breakwas going to be the biggest game of the summer. Its Steam demo hit over 300,000 players a while back and feedback from fans and critics has been largely positive.
I had a decent time with it too, although I jumped in a bit too late only to find myself utterly lost in the sauce. There were a lot of women with jiggly bodies and enormous mechs for them to control. And, uh, one of the opening cutscenes has your character showering and going to the toilet. I got a pretty good understanding of what the game was about, and who it was for. Gooners. And folks who like intense mech-based combat, of course.
Cut to its launch, and Mecha Break has opened to ‘Mixed’ Steam reviews despite sportingover 100,000 concurrent players at its peak. As someone who is always morbidly curious whenever a game starts to pop off on the platform, I hit the download button and jumped in, telling myself that I was going to start with a clean slate. No prior impressions. Just take everything at face value.
I did say this isn’t about the microtransactions -we’ve already dug into these a little bit here- so let’s focus more on the game itself.
Mecha Break is just…mid.
Repetitive Gameplay, No Comms, No Clear Goals
Mechs are cool. I like mechs. Not as much as some people, but I still think they’re kinda rad. Mecha Break has some gnarly ones as well - my absolute favourite is Narukami, a stealthy sniper mech with decoy drones and invisibility tech. You’ll get absolutely melted the moment anyone wants to actually fight you, so my preferred method of play is to attack from a distance and then vanish into thin air whenever anyone gets close. Sorry folks, that’s just how it is.
Narukami is fun to play, to a point, with a lot of skill expression available with each individual mech on offer.
That being said, I played a few rounds as Tricera, a massive mech that turns into a shielded turret. Sure, you can’t move while in this form, but you also won’t die. I’ve had an entire team shooting at me and slashing away with swords, and I’ve just sat there tanking it all and slowly melting them with my gatling guns. Fun.
Then there’s Alysnes, the starting mech, which is just completely broken. you may run around and trap your opponents in a melee stun-lock and even if they manage to kill you, you are revived back to full health and armor and can continue whaling on them. This mech has pretty much turned me off the game completely. It’s just totally unbalanced. How many other bits of gameplay are unbalanced, but we just haven’t figured them out yet?
The game doesn’t really deliver on its promises of high skill expression and enjoyment right from the start. I spent the first few hours just grinding against lobbies filled entirely with bots. I understand that Mecha Break is a complicated experience with lots of distinct mechanics, and other games utilize bot lobbies for new players, but the best possible way to learn a new game is to play against real people. The most enjoyable part of any new experience is learning together, regardless of the failures you confront along the way.
Unlike Fortnite, where the bot lobbies were introduced to help new players tackle the game before being destroyed by veterans,there are no veterans in Mecha Break. Everyone sucks right now. Just let me play with them.
It’s All A Bit Generic
Now that I’ve climbed my way out of Bronze and I am working my way up the rankings, I’m definitely encountering more real players. But this has exposed something else completely dull about Mecha Break: every match is pretty much the same. There’s such little map and mode diversity, and everything just sort of looks identical.
The Operation Verge game mode has you duke it out in six-versus-six battles that cover some of the rudimentary interpretations you’d expect in a hero shooter like this, like a payload mode, a straight fight-to-the-death team deathmatch mode, and a mode where you need to capture points. Maps are large but not particularly interesting; they remind me a little bit of Quake but without the extremely-refined map design that made those locales pop.
Mostly they’re grey industrial landscapes, some set in the desert, others in abandoned cityscapes. There’s very little colour to the maps, which doesn’t go well with the predominantly grey mechs. You traverse landscapes and buildings so quickly that the whole thing becomes an uninspiring blur.
Visual effects like missiles, impact damage and movement are great, and you’d expect them to be - the game is built in Unreal Engine 5 and looks snazzy. There is, however, a lot of visual clutter. Half the game is just trying to figure out what’s shooting you and where from, while also trying to dodge homing rockets and check your energy, shield, HP, and bullets. The HUD is sputtered all over the screen as well, making it hard to get your bearings in combat situations without making mistakes or feeling overwhelmed.
I’m sure with enough time invested you could get excellent at Mecha Break, but there’s other stuff that’s stopping me from spending more time with it. The balance just feels off. The time-to-kill isn’t very rewarding. Movement is at times very slick, and other times extremely sluggish. The energy system is just poorly implemented - you know what? I hate most stamina systems in games - and there’s no real sense of progression right now unless you’re willing to fall victim to abrasive microtransactions. You can earn new cosmetics through a gacha lootbox system, but I’ve played for nearly five hours now and haven’t encountered a single box.
Mecha Break’s core gameplay shows promise, and it’s always good to see more mech-based combat, because it’s inherently pretty awesome. The game might receive some updates that improve on some of these negative factors, and I’ll definitely keep my eye on the game going forwards.
