When it comes to video games about big robots fighting each other, it doesn’t feel like you need to think of many things to make 🎉it fun. Do the mechs look cool? Does it feel good to pilot them and destroy your rivals?

These are the two main tenets that need to be nailed so we can start discussing if the ga💜me in front of us is worth discussing in the first place. While it may sound simple enough, there&rsquo♔;s myriad titles (usually with the “Gundam” label) that always get something wrong. Sometimes flying the mechs is unnecessarily complex and feels counterintuitive, or the combat runs out of ideas too quickly. Other times, you just can’t believe how little love the mechs themselves get.

After playing a few dozen matches in , the upcomi🌄ng multiplayer game by Amazing Seasun Games, I’m happy to say that it’s a mecha game that gets things right. Your first battles will be a chaotic mess, as is par for the course with any hero shooter you jump into. But in this case, the amount of lasers, flashes, projectiles, and machines moving at high speed around you can prove a little much at first. However, give it some time, mess around with every available mech until you find a comfortable one, and you’ll start enjoying the sweet and fun melody of robot destruction.

Merely dashing around in muꦡltiple🍸 directions while throwing missiles, feeling completely in control, for a few minutes is enough to sense something special has been created here.

There were more than ten unique mechs in the beta and each one was pretty😼 different based on their class: you have snipers that can prepare long and precise shots from afar, healers that can repair allies and even become invisible or give useful buffs, more agile robots capable of transforming into cool jets that can travel quickly to their destinations, and heavier ones with great shields or huge axes that make you say ‘hell yeah’ every time you destroy someone with it.

Most of the mechs are derivative enough that you can compare them to an Overwatcꦐh character or another game in the genre, but not one felt like a blatant ripoff.

Their designs also take clear inspiratio🌞n from the likes of anime and video game classics like Evangelion, Macross, Gundam, Visions of Escaflowne, Armored Core, Front🦂 Mission Evolved, and more.

My favorite ones were a brawler thaꦺt can charge a lance and impale one enemy for a few meters, and a mech specialized in laser attacks that can hit multiple targets at once or focus on one unlucky target for better damage.

Thanks to the simple and customizable button layout and HUD, learning what each robot could do, at least on a surface level, wasn&r🤡squo;t tough at all — it was a matt♔er of spending just a few minutes with them on the battlefield. Plus, you always have the chance to go into training before ever purchasing the model and quickly find out if it is worth the credits.

You start with only one playable mech and you immediately get funds to buy a second one. Then you have to buy the rest of the cast, with variable prices💦 of credits you can earn in-game. How many mechs will be ready to use on release and how fast you’ll be able to purchase the models you want is unclear right now.

The same applies to Mods, a series of parts𓄧 you can equip your mechs with to receive a wild variety of enhancements. Will these remain balanced? Would you be able to get꧅ a good selection quickly enough so you don’t fall behind with other players? After a few matches, I got a special bundle, which let me buy all the mechs and get a good chunk of mods pretty quickly, so I can’t really weigh in yet.

When it comes to the game’s modes, there were three usual suspects that involved moving a payload and stopping the enemy from moving theirs, capturing zones, and a final one where you must interact w♔ith devices that appear on the map from time to time. Nothing to write home about, but they were functional enough and kept me invested. Fortunately, more modes will be available at launch, and the team-based nature of the game with all the possible synergies that can take place depending on your team composition could be enough for this experience to be something more.

My criticisms of Mecha Break had to do with everything surrounding its presentation. Apart from the cool 🌺mechs and effective sound design, I grew tired of the artificial female voice that accompanies you throughout in only a few matches, and I found the menus to be ugly and not that helpful at all.

I spent a while thinking that there was only one way of changing your mech cꦛolors, which felt like a tragedy, until I discovered that there’s only one fixed pattern that you can buy, but there’s a healthy selection of paints to customize your machine with — and a lot of these were great!

There’s also an int🎃eresting amount of options for your human character’s customization, more than enough to recreate the young traumatized anime teenager of your dreꦿams, but their general design looks generic as hell. This shouldn’t sound like a big deal in a game focused on mecha battles, but you’ll be surprised with how much time you’ll end up seeing human characters — before each match, after each death, and when the battle ends.

Despite its occasionally clunky presentation, I had more fun than I expected with Mecha Break. The gameplay foundations are solid, and it seems that Amazing Seasun Games has spent a good time polishing several aspects that could quickly make it sterile. As it happens ꦅwith every live-service game, only time and the acceptance of the community will tell if Mecha Break gets to live and for how long. If you ask me, I’m ready to start impaling big robots again.