Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor review. Two questions arise when confronted with the notion of Steel Battalion – a series of mech games controlled, and made infamous, by a dedicated controller that wouldn’t look out of place in a NASA vessel – joining the Kinect catalogue.
First, why? Second, how? The former is the simpler to fathom: the push to make Kinect more appealing to ‘core’ gamers has attracted and encouraged both leading and slightly more obscure brands to gravitate slowly but surely towards the hardware. Cult-favourite developers are creators who’ve made their names by embracing a creative challenge and taking a risk, so it’s not particularly surprising to find them on the frontline of experimental design – Tetsuya Mizuguchi with Child Of Eden, Yukio Futatsugi with Crimson Dragon and now From Software with Steel Battalion.
Videogames Magazine - gamesTM - Official Website. The year is 2082, and a silicon-eating microbe has chewed its way through all microprocessors an event referred to as the ‘datacide’, leaving only clunky, chugging, unpredictable technology in its wake.
As such, in this Steel Battalion the mechs aren’t iPods but more like VHS machines. They’re plodding M4 Shermans on legs; cramped, sweaty and claustrophobic, pocked with blast holes and held together with spit and scotch tape. You’re sat in the belly of such a cantankerous old tin can surrounded by a bank of knobs, levers and buttons that require your attention if you’re to win the ongoing struggle against an evil Chinese-led UN. Famously, the original Steel Battalion required players to control the action on screen with a physical facsimile of such a cockpit; an overtly complicated 40-button beast of a peripheral. When you’re in the thick of combat these issues escalate from niggles into near game breaking flaws. Videogames Magazine - gamesTM - Official Website. Edge Magazine Game Reviews. GamesIndustry International.