Robots are awesome. Whether it’s androids, cyborgs, mechs or even synths, add robots to stuff and it instantly becomes cool. This effect goes into overdrive, of course, when the robots are giant; hell, look at the confusing mess of plot that Evangelion is, there’s no way that would have succeeded without the giant robot/monster fights. What is even better than that, obviously, is if there are two giant robots fighting each other and one of them is you. So we introduce War Tech Fighters, a game where you get to fly into space and fight giant robots with a giant lightsaber, because of course you do.
War Tech Fighters is a space mech combat game from Drakkar Dev, a company mostly responsible for creating mobile games such as Monkey Racing and Clash of Puppets. War Tech Fighers was published by Green Man Games, the publishing arm of well known online game retailer Green Man Gaming. War Tech Fighters marks the developer’s first time making a game for the PC, and it’s quite ambitious to boot.
In War Tech Fighters, you control Captain Nathan Romanis, fighting alongside rebels against the Zatros Empire, flying through space taking on enemy ships and sword fighting with other people flying other giant robots. If it seems like the story description is a little slim, it might be because while the story is perfectly solid, it is almost certainly not the main attraction. That is not to say that effort wasn’t put into the story, it’s just that the storyline gets overshadowed by the giant robots and the intense space battles.
The action all takes place in space, go figure. You control your mech by moving with the left stick and aim with the right, and clicking in the right stick moves you up and down. The system of using the R stick to both aim and control your vertical/horizontal position is a pretty damn decent way to control an object flying in 3-dimensional space. You also have the option of using some of the face buttons instead, but honestly the first option fits much more naturally into gameplay than the second.
The gameplay for War Tech Fighters keeps things simple for the most part, at least in the action department. You have a light gun, a heavy gun, a shield and rockets to use in ship-to-ship combat and engage mechs with your heavy attack and light attack sword strikes. To engage the enemy robots in close combat, you need to get near them and tap X so you can both pull out your swords and face off against each other. Some of the movements you do during these segments are pretty ridiculous, but then again, this is a game about giant sword-fighting robots flying through space, so that can probably be put down to willing suspension of disbelief.
As well as the ability to engage other mechs, you can also use the X button to perform a finishing blow to the enemy ships you’ve been fighting. These animations are a highlight of the space battles and are like a less gory version of the glory kills from the 2016 Doom game. They show your robot chopping ships clean in half, ripping them into pieces, karate kicking them and possibly the best being the one where the robot punches a ship onto his arm and then extends his shield, blowing the ship into pieces. There is possibly nothing cooler in the world than watching a giant robot turn a spaceship into molten slag.
Do not be fooled into thinking that you’re simply flying around deep space willy nilly. In fact, you have a variety of missions to complete to finish the story campaign and a bunch of extra challenges on the side. The story missions all follow the central plot but have different goals and ways of completing them. For some missions you’re rescuing missing pilots and have to follow clues to locate them. Sometimes you’re escorting larger, slower ships as they cross enemy territory, and sometimes it’s a straight dogfight against a rogues gallery of giant robots and space ships.
For those who want a little more personal involvement in your giant robot (and let’s face, it who doesn’t want that?), you have endless options for customization. You manage both the mechanical upgrades as well as the superficial design of your mech, so you can make it neon pink and give it a helmet that looks a little bit like a knob, and it’ll be extra funny when it chops the more serious mechs in half. The upgrades make for more incremental, RPG-style improvements, instead of sudden practical differences like other action games might do. Whether that is a good thing or not is really up to you, and it depends on whether or not you like some RPG with your mech games.
You have a variety of challenges to attempt that you can find in the simulator menu, which is also the place you can access the tutorials from. The challenges are based around a variety of different things, sometimes it’s a shooting gallery, sometimes it’s a race and sometimes it’s just a straight-up fight. As you complete each stage of the challenge, you unlock a higher level of the challenge until you’ve completed them all. These challenges add some stuff to do in the game other than the standard missions, but a lot of the time it feels like you need to have upgraded your mech a fair amount before these missions are doable. Luckily, there is also a survival mode in which you have to take on waves of enemies and see how long you can make it, so you’re probably not gonna run out of stuff to do at least.
Developer: Drakkar Dev
Publisher: Green Man Gaming Publishing
Platforms: PC
Release Date: 25th July 2018
Want more mech action? Check out our review of Scythe here.
Fancy War Mech Fighters? Buy the game HERE