WarTech Senko No Ronde review

Wartech Senko No Ronde has a beautiful narrated introduction, with softly flowing music and nice pictures to supplement the storytelling. Unfortunately, after rigorous investigation, we can find no link between the intro and the rest of the game. In fact, even the artwork being displayed during the narration often has no perceptible connection with what is being said. Right from the beginning of the game, it's apparent that the main problem with WarTech is that there are good ideas in the game but they're too disjointed to hold it all together.

Descended from a 2004 arcade game, WarTech  is essentially a mech-on-mech fighter that occasionally and seemingly randomly shifts to a more traditional space shooter in the 20 min long, dreadfully misnamed, story mode. You'll spend most of your playtime in one-on-one bouts, pitting one of eight mech pilots against each other, while non-contextual and ultimately meaningless dialogue ensues. You can't really read the subtitles, because it's an action game and if you look down you'll get blasted into metallic space confetti. But don't worry: it doesn't really make a difference anyway.

Subtitle issues aside, the story has one big thing going for it: WarTech is a fighting game. The first thing you'll notice about the battles are the loads of flashing dots, exploding laser thingies and other seizure inducing screen content. This isn't a bad thing, but there is no tutorial aside from the training mode, which lets you wail on a dummy robot, while not really teaching you much about the games strategy. Once our eyes stopped dilating and we'd spent considerable time with the rather brief manual, we started to get the hang of playing.

To our buddies next to us on the couch, the combat looked flashy and fun. The two mechs exchanging lasers and missiles, the camera occasionally zooming in for a cool, crisp looking melee attack and each player periodically activating the B.O.S.S. mode - calling down an extra shell of armor ten times the size of her opponent for some utterly silly levels of blasting. Sadly, after the relatively long period of figuring out what the hell is happening, the battles distill down to a very simple and repetitive style for the poor fellas stuck holding the controllers. The mechs are grossly unbalanced and the visually complex gameplay only temporarily masks the fact that isn't strategic enough to have real levels of mastery.