Gaming Target - Xbox: MechAssault

Written by Leigh Culpin on March 27, 2002

First Impressions: Size DOES matterЕ

With online play capabilities, 20 planned single player missions, 12 huge mechs and fully УinteractiveФ (destroyable) environments, MechAssualt promises to be the most fast paced mech BattleTech game yet. Following along with the MechWarrior series for PC, you'll take command of a giant mass of might and metal and travel to exotic locales to destroy your enemies. However, the game's developer, Day 1 Studios, has taken a more straightforward approach than found in the previous games Ц you won't have to worry about such strategic items like heatsinks as much anymore, but simply watch a heat meter alongside your armor and ammo levels. This promises a much more exciting game, focusing less on being an engineer and more on being a pilot.

Traditionally the games have always been finely balanced with strategy, in how you customize your mech and use your lance mates, and action, where you go about completing mission objectives Ц destroying mechs, buildings, etc. However, the objectives would sometimes leave you waiting a long time for something, and lack of an in-game save feature made these games really more for people who wanted to sit down and spend a good amount of time being completely immersed in the MechWarrior world. There's nothing wrong with that, but Day 1 hopes to aim this game more at the general action game player Ц the battlefields (which are mighty impressive, by the way) will be littered with enemies of all kinds rather than having them spread out strategically, and will even give you the chance to upgrade your mech on the field (assuming you don't mind being taken out of the action while your team installs the new hardware). The missions do have objectives, but they'll be greatly complicated by opposing forces and various sub-objectives.

The weapons include many old favorites, like rockets, PPC's and lasers, and they are just as destructive as ever. The screenshots that have been released so far are extremely impressive, with snow-filled levels, huge and detailed mechs, and incredible buildings towering high above your already-huge form. You can shoot the buildings to the point of collapsing; taking any nearby forces with it, and the glass shatters and falls to the ground convincingly. The mechs can be equipped with numerous amour configurations, and even jump jets allowing you to fly up and look helicopters in the eye before destroying them. The option of a first-person view has been taken away to give you the real sense of scale that you're dealing with, and to show of the high-poly machines you'll be piloting.

Some of the game's real potential, however, lies in the multiplayer Ц alongside the standard split-screen and system link options, MechAssault is the first game that officially uses the Xbox Online system, and will have support for the Voice Communicator. The game is also theoretically going to have a kind of map editor built into the multiplayer Ц teams get to allocate points to building either a heavy base or heavy squad of mechs, and get to place their main buildings, turrets and such where they see fit. This could add a great element to typical gametypes like deathmatch and CTF because the bases will never be in the same places twice, and you can change how fortified you want your base to be compared to your small band armed forces. How many players can join in the action at once is still up in the air, but I'd expect to see the standard 16 or if we're lucky, 32, depending on how stable the network is when Microsoft launches it and such.