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LordRoss
Mecho Wars (Minis)
Publisher: Creat Studios
Developer: Creat Studios / Oyaji Games
Price £3.99 (on offer to PS+ subscribers this month at £2.39)
Mecho Wars is a turn-based strategy game, very much in the same vein as Advance Wars and its PSP imitator, Field Commander. Of course, the origins of these games go back much further, to war-gaming board games and these in turn have their centuries-old roots in chess. But Advance Wars epitomised the genre in the minds of many gamers, and did such a good job that it's the yard-stick against which newer games are inevitably measured.
Setting itself apart from its genre rivals, Mecho Wars has a distinctive visual style, rendered in a vibrant pink-to-purple palette, and featuring the detailed pixel art of British artist and game designer Luc Bernard. The cutesy world of the Divination Deserts is populated by two alien-looking factions, the organic-appearing Winged Crusaders and the more mechanical Landians. Complementing the rich visual style is an excellent sound-track, mixing real instruments with elements of electronic percussion and often evoking an eerie sense of anticipation as you put your nefarious plans into action.
The single-player campaign starts with you learning the ropes as Rookie, an aspiring Winged Crusader, learning how to move your units and engage the enemy. As you progress through the levels, tougher and more complex scenarios are thrown at you, and the history of these two powers is told through short vignettes at the beginning of each mission. After getting to grips with the infantry and heavy units, you're introduced to aerial units and the classic rock-paper-scissors gameplay comes to the fore: infantry is strong against aerial units; aerial units are strong against heavy units; heavy units are strong against infantry. Different units also have different movement ranges and attack ranges and different production costs. Only infantry units can seize headquarters, cities (sources of cash) and land-based factories (sources of units). Aerial units ignore terrain bonuses and minuses, while heavy units (though powerful) cannot pass over mountains.
And once you've got your head around that particular battle-dynamic, the game introduces aquatic forces, confined to the watery regions of the maps but strong againt land units (while in turn being particularly weak against aerial units). Before too long, you unlock a second campaign, the Landians' story, so you get to see both sides of the war. Intelligently, the developers allow you to play these in parallel – no need to complete the Winged Crusader campaign first – and the game saves all your current mission data continuously, without any fuss, so you can drop out of one campaign and play the other, or a challenge map, knowing you can return right where you left off.
As you take your turns and your opponent makes his, in-game hours pass and the palette changes neatly to reflect this, though it always remains colourful. And there is a very inventive feature in that for the four hours (pairs of turns) after midnight, the water regions freeze over, allowing infantry and heavy units to pass over it, offering time-limited shortcuts, and freezing the aquatic units in place. The first time a pair of enemy units teamed up to seize my water-based factory I was caught completely off-guard and it turned the battle very much in my enemy's favour. You can be sure I learned to return the favour... But don't let you land-based units stay on the ice too long because they don't swim.
Outside the campaign, you can take on a friend in a pass-the-controller turn-by-turn way or take on the AI on one of twenty different challenge maps. In multiplayer there are four different objectives to choose from – annihilate the enemy units, capture the enemy HQ(s), accumulate a target sum of cash or assassinate a single pre-selected unit. Against the AI, you can choose between annihilation and HQ-capturing modes.
The gameplay is strong, the interface slick and effective and there is loads of content and replayability. The two forces are made up of units with exactly the same abilities and costs, and most of the well-designed levels are structurally symmetric, so there is no question that it is perfectly balanced.
There are no glaring flaws in the game, only a number of niggles and missed opportunities. For example there is no option to select a difficulty level, so if you're finding the campaign too easy or too hard, tough luck. Likewise there are no options to handicap one side in a challenge map, or fiddle with the objectives. Given that the AI is particularly vulnerable to a couple of tactical manoeuvres, this is a shame. The shoulder buttons, analogue stick, triangle and square are completely unused, so it's a pity that the game misses such useful options as the ability to cycle between your units or scroll around the map without moving the cursor – these factors no doubt stem from the game's origin as an iOS title. Such is the balance of the game and the ease with which infantry can be purchased and deployed that the game can become a war of attrition, and though you may have the clear upper hand it may still take numerous turns to be able to achieve the level objective against a plucky defense.
It's no Advance Wars, but then it is a good, playable strategy at a fraction of the cost, and packs some novel features and a unique look. Though it's not quite an essential purchase, it stands out among the Minis range and would provide a fair few hours of entertainment to any budding turn-based tacticians.
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