mjpartyboy in another thread yesterday said:
I bought the reissue that came with the original game and Line of Contact a couple of years ago and still haven't taken it out of the box.
Gah! You cause me pain
Well in an effort to encourage you, and like minded people to get and play this game here's some thoughts of mine.
I finally got around to buying Tekki / Steel Battalion this year. One significant hurdle was not currently owning a Xbox, but i've borrowed a mates, and the second was availability, but since the LOC servers have been turned off, and its sorta old now, people have been dumping copies "cheap". When i say cheap i mean compared to the original huge pricetag.
Sorry about the carpet, teh English have no taste sometimes.
So what is it? Well its a mecha game, which is firmly in the sim side. You pilot large "Vertical Tanks" (VT) and are engaged in a post-modern fight between two asian powers. Queue generic sotryline. I have to say the production values are outstanding; the controller obviously, but it gets "gritty mech" down so well i fail to see how it could be improved, apart from obvious things like more bots/players online (re: Chromehounds) and more realistic trees etc.
It certainly is NOT Armored Core or other arcadey mecha, but the pace is faster than i was led to believe, as you can use the Plasma Torch weapons to dash, much like using the Samurai Blades in AC, and lights going flat out with Override are very fast. Combat itself is more sedate, with turning speeds quite low, slow rate of weapon fire and no jumping/flying (well very limited). It does make for more tatical combat, as positioning can actually be important and luring with your wingmen and so on. While this makes it seem superfically sound a little like Mech Assault, a game i hated with a passion, its more like Mech Warrior games, as you can take far less punishment and must be quite careful in avoiding slugfests. The top (with your guns) can independatly rotate in your front 180 degree arc, and you can do dash/sidesteps as long as you have battery energy to do so, which recharges over time, but uses fuel. You can carry extra fuel and also call in supply drops, but each has costs in either speed/performance of pure cash and the danger of refueling in a battlezone. The latter also replenishes your ammo, which obviously is needed depending on mission length or your triggerfinger. Guns are a variety of large bore cannons, missiles down to "machine guns", which are like 80-140mm! think of an M1 Abhram at fully auto, and later railguns (woot!).
The death = delete-save-file isnt as annoying as people say, it gives you a fair amount of time to eject, which combined with supply-points to buy more VTs means it more a mechanism to give a limited number of lives, like an arcade game say. Ultimately i think its a bad idea as it cuts down your willingness to experiment with different tactics, or play it less safe. Yes you can do "Free Mission" games, but in the campaign proper it would be nice to try out weird ****. I suppose thats part of the grittiness, the fear of destruction is real, moreso than any game i've ever played i think, which adds a tension behind my left eyeball when the controls start lighting up!
Purely as a game it's good, but not outstanding, but as an experience it is amazing. just running thru the start sequence brings a smile to my face. I had to get a special cable to get DD5.1 and link it to my projector, but the surround sound and 100" screen are mindblowing (the size helps resolve that tiny view-field of 1st gen VTs). Given its uniquness i certainly recommend playing it at least once as it
IS a slice of mecha history, which i doubt we will see repeated any time soon, and its probably the only reason to keep an Xbox around as it looks like it will never get the 360 backwards compatibility treatment. Just a pity it was made for Bill's bastard love-child and not a more popular machine...
