If you heard loud cursing in the Watford area last night, it could have been one of two things: 1) I’m cursing at my (borrowed) Steam Deck and surreptitiously accessing Wi-Fi from outside a closed public library that I don’t currently have. broadband at home, or 2) I’m subsequently trying to build head or heel Mech Engineer, in which you take charge of a mobile undersea metropolis and send squads of carefully assembled slave soldiers into semi-auto battle with squid-like alien fauna.
Engineering a mech is a herculean task that eludes today’s puny scientists to complete, and Mech Engineer does not aim to make life easy, whatever its purported “entertainment” status. Mech Engineer is a game with an attitude problem, honestly. I realized this the other day in the game when the interface coughed up a bunch of damage reports presented as pieces of paper that I then had to individually crumple up and throw away.
That interface! There’s an innocent 30 seconds in the beginning where you think it’s just poorly designed. But then you realize that it is a creature of vile and labyrinthine purpose. It generally consists of a Dwarven Fortress grid-based world map where you can move around your city and send mech units on missions, with cards to research new components, craft them and assemble them into coffin-sized Gundams that you can then. fill the piles. There is a calendar that allows you to go to the next day. When I read those sentences back, it sounds practically transparent. Like XCOM but with extra robots, right? Poorly! Mech Engineer is nothing like XCOM. It’s like tying your shoelaces with scissors. It’s like putting together a puzzle in a cesspool after the sun dies.
When I mentioned Mech Engineer to Graham, he said it reminded him of the older ’em up MicroProse interface, in which the excitement comes from the quasi-analog, high-fidelity confusing simulation itself. I subsequently left and discovered that yes, MicroProse is the publisher of Mech Engineer. I don’t have the benefit of Graham’s very advanced years and accompanying experience with recreational nuisances, but Mech Engineer almost feels like a parody of MicroProse games on par with Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.
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The interface is an acidic morass of distracting dials, submarine-style cutouts, wire graphs and obscure LED readings arranged in stark contrast to current notions of ‘flow’, with multiple ways of switching between screens constantly competing for your attention, on-screen buttons instead of keyboard controls, a habit of miniaturizing the most important elements and an unrelenting desire to overcomplicate every smallest interaction. Again, you might think it’s poorly made, but it’s clearly a labor of love. Every single fixture is just as accurate, from the monochrome shooting range simulator to the authentically paper bestiaries and landscape illustrations to the vast array of alarming SFX and mechanical messages that rumble from the beast’s guts as you puzzle over the wrong press. bits and kills of your pilots.
Real mechanical engineering is thorough and seems engrossing. For example: you have to construct, test and ignite a mech reactor before inserting it into the chassis, which feels vaguely flush – icing on a carefully optimized cake in the form of subtly thin armour, optional energy shields and rustling. Gatling guns that can be upgraded and shortened to your satisfaction. Combat, meanwhile, is pretty hands-off and visually reminiscent of Duskers: you give your unit waypoints and play with things like spacing as they fire at Space Invaders in real-time on a scratchy radar display until they run out of ammo or crash. under stress.
Your pilots have animated cameos, and my word, they’re an unsightly bunch even before you feed them aliens—not so much an army of Doomguys as a bunch of chatbot gargoyles yawning at you from the abyss. Again, there’s a bit of a feel to it all that piques my curiosity, even as I whimper anxiously, furiously uninstall the demo, and rush back to the library at midnight to download something more subtle like Tiny Glade. Mecha Engineer! How I hate you, especially since I just realized that Sin wrote you three years ago – honestly, it sounds like the only thing that’s really changed since then is that you can now buy the whole thing on Steam.