You know, mechanized warfare is one of my favorite things. Think I spoke heavily about my time playing Armored Core here. A little bot floating about with a human conscious inside is picking apart, and controlling a light tank unit while on a mission to shoot out at juggernauts.
It's a ridiculous power fantasy, enemies are prone to being blown up easily, long as their weaknesses are targeted, and I have the necessary protection and weaponry to engage. Tankhead, not the book, is presented as a roguelite tank shooter, where I have to find and scrape together, collect junk for repairs, and fight against every other enemy units while sustaining myself.
The fun comes from how it captures vehicular combat, the various weapons are fun to try out, swapping parts allow for experimenting, and from a visual standpoint, it's a phenomenal looking title. Albeit, with a lot of shortcomings, which kind of breaks my heart.
In the ECA, you're one of the few left, a drone unit named Whitaker who has to reach Highpoint for personal reasons. A contractor named Cyril gives him a gig, and tank to carry out his missions. This guy is very straight to the point, as he needs the money to look after his people.
Within the hub, I'm given a single tank, taught how to carry parts, repairing the tank and its parts through collected junk, and connect them before reattaching myself to the tank. Driving it to the main hub, going through the terminals for chip upgrades and buying parts, before finally talking to Cyril, and selecting the first mission to be deployed into The Grid.
So, outside of talking to Cyril, who gives me some idea of what the game is about through dialogues, the open-world has interactive aspects like magazines, news articles, posters, and such giving background stories to what happened around here in the post-war wasteland.
People have also abandoned their flesh for these droids, because they thought it was easier to do so. End result is most of them giving up on life, while others don tanks being in control by The Authority. These are the enemy tanks that get in my way. They're territorial, and pretty much almost anywhere I go exploring to collect stuff around.
Several important things to note: Ammo is limited, my car has self-repair kits, scraps can be taken from destroyed enemies and from scraping parts, and the enemies have somehow stronger components to use like armor plates, faster motors, and wheels. But most importantly, it's the weapons. You have primary and secondary weapons, primary can be reloaded with ammo packs, all I have to do is deattach the little guy, and fill them up. Risky that is.
Secondary weapons are anti-tank guns, rocket or grenade launchers, LMG turrets, and so on. These exist for dishing out big time damage against stronger foes. Afterward, they're scrap. I can't keep going around places, blowing up tanks, everything is at limited access.
That's the whole point of the roguelite, I have to make use of everything I have to survive. I collect some currency after doing side objectives and killing them, before using them in shops, which took me a while to realize exists. If I knew that existed, I wouldn't have died in my first boss battle. This thing is something out of an Eldritch horror, even launching minions at me.
Honestly, if the vehicular combat wasn't good, like the feedback it gives from the sound design to the visual information and feel, I would have easily lost interest. Controlling the vehicle on the other hand is tricky. There's an easy way it can spin off, and takes getting used to steering while aiming the tank, getting it wrong can easily make me target practice.
My tank can boost as well, though, using regular tires it just makes me less slow. Getting the speedy ones makes me actually spin out of control easier if I'm not careful. Like, the parts are great, but there's always trade-offs. That is, unless the tires get damaged, and worn off.
Dying isn't all bad, I mean, I do loss everything, but if I collect enough chips, I can get refits, increase no of repair kits, and E-115 currency to buy weapons and parts. Among other things like increasing tank damage, health, increased movement of gun aiming, etc.
These are easily obtained when my Needle goes scavenging about, finding death terminals and robots, the other important thing is well doing the objectives like diffusing pipelines, terminal stations, extracting Persona Materials, and so on. The last one is very important, it's my primary mission to summon the boss battle, and finish the run without losing everything.
Is there a story to all of this? Yeah, there is. Apparently, each mission ends with me being plugged in by Cyril with the cores taken from each boss, which tells an intriguing story, and flashbacks where you get the world building, and personal stakes about my main character himself. Hell, even the human characters are present. There are some stealth sections, quippy dialogues.
That, and the environmental storytelling, despite being pretty minimalist, has quite the stuff to tell. Also, it's super tense to go around the sandbox, before out of the blue, incoming enemies summon and attack me. Except this gets super annoying as it happens every 1-3 minutes on next mission.
Alright, now all of this sounds great. You ready for the lousy part? This game is early access, it's short, and it's an Epic Games exclusive. It also has performance and technical problems, the sandbox when it comes to just exploring, doesn't seem to offer much.
Like, I've seen it all before in the second mission. Also, notice the visual noising, yeah, this is a demanding title, and yet the FSR implementation is a bit troubling. Boss battles become kind of easier, but maybe it's because of the shield gadget I've used. They're pretty cool, though. Overall, maybe wait for patches and content, or the price to drop. Better yet, wait till it arrives in Steam.
