Disappointed by Mecha Break

Mecha Break won me over with previous beta test periods. Maybe the biggest difference from other shooters is that by default you have a lock on that will snap your aim to the target that's nearest to you and closest to the center of your screen. So the skills required shift from fast, twitchy aiming into letting you focus more on your own movements and keep up the broad aiming sweeps to stay on your target. Maintain your lock on and break theirs.

I played a lot of Skyraider and liked it enough to fiddle with paints until I made it look like the Zeta Gundam and had a great time playing the bomber/A10 Warthog. Triceras and Stegos weren't safe to hunker down in their turret modes and the multi-missile pod could blast out a lot of damage in a teamfight if I hit near clustered enemies.

It was great! I had a blast! I was looking forward to the future release!

And now I am really, really, really underwhelmed.

To start things off on a sour note, the tutorial is even longer and more unskippable now. It starts out with a big cinematic tutorial bit where the space station you're on gets attacked so you jump into a robot, survive re-entry, and finally take down the big bot that blew up the space station. Flashy but it covers all the gameplay basics, so it's fine. Then you are forced into cutscenes with poor writing and poor voice-acting because it's a mix of poorly directed voice actors and then AI text-to-speech voices that only mostly sound like the actors. Then you're thrown into matches that I know now are likely against bots. But not knowing that I really hated feeling pushed into PVP before I had a slightest handle on the game. And now there's more PVE missions you have to do as well. You can finally skip cutscenes but if you aren't that's over an hour of not being able to do anything but click into the next mission.

Which I already hate. I feel my interest and my learning shutting down when I am just not allowed to explore any options.

And what's even worse is that in this whole forced tutorial segment you're locked out of the shooting range mode! You don't get to practice at all!

The next sour note is unit unlocks. You don't get any. Everyone gets the basic mech and everything else costs in-game currency.

Are they all the same price? No, some are arbitrarily more expensive. Up to five times as expensive. Including my Skyraider! So yes, I am actually extremely unenthused about the game right now because I am arbitrarily denied from playing what was my main.

And my refusal to unlock cheaper mechs until I save up for my Skyraider is exposing the weaknesses in a bunch of elements of the game.

For instance, weekly missions! You can pick your weeklies, which is nice. Except that you pick from a randomly generated list of mech-specific missions. Which includes mechs you haven't unlocked. Which means they have to have a free reroll button for you to mash on until you're shown missions you can actually complete.

And the queues! Now, I did unlock two dirt cheap units because one was also something I used a lot of last test. So I have three units in total, in a game where you can't have more than one of the same unit on your team.

I am relatively certain I have been in queues with mostly bots and maybe 1-2 other humans on my team because the game cannot let me into the normal all-humans queue. If my three units got locked by my teammates, I literally would not be able to join a match.

One of the other things that they added is a PvPvE extraction shooter mode. Teams of 3 drop into a region-sized map with NPC enemies to blow up and take stuff from. And then you run out of space immediately because you start with so few inventory slots that if you aren't only taking the highest-tier loot you're full after one battle against NPCs. And there's no requirement to fight other teams, you could just get in and get to an extraction point fast and leave the game. If you're fast enough you might not see another team.

And what do you get? Blueprints for new handheld weapons... that you can only use in the PvPvE mode and do nothing if all you care is the 6v6 mode. And paint... mostly just unlocking new shades or getting them in different states of weathered because they decided that paint damage should be unlocked instead of a slider in the paint shop. And mods.

I don't give a damn about mods. The mods in the game are all minor stat changes. +2% resistance to energy weapons and -2% resistance to ballistic weapons. Nothing feels GOOD to attach because everything has an equivalent downside bolted on and while you could probably optimize things into having +10% to a relevant stat and -2% to a bunch of others... why bother? I can't conceptualize what the difference in my experience is when the changes are so minor. There aren't qualitative or gameplay shifts.

So if the major thing I'm getting from this mod is bits and bobs I don't care about, why would I queue it? Or even really try?

And the game is excessively gaze-y and cheesecake-y and I was willing to overlook it last time because I enjoyed the gameplay but now that they have thrown up so many roadblocks to me just being able to enjoy the game, it's also grating on me.

Having jiggle physics is undercut by unexpressive character models that are barely moving their faces. And the fact that they have built their character designs so that everyone must be what I can only describe as K-pop smooth and pretty means everyone looks the same. The same overly perfect, manufactured way. It undermines their story segments when the grizzled-but-idealistic commander looks like a 20-year old with extremely styled hair.

Maybe it's me, because I am thirty or forty years old and do not need this. But the extent that every character looks the same (young, smooth, pretty) and the fanservice is so boringly blatant turns it into noise. There's no titillation to be gained. It's the same camera angles, the same jiggles, the same lack of expression and for what? It's not even actually sexy because of this! Goddamn borderline porno waifu gachas on your phone are better at being sexy because you can get more personality types! More body types! Different outfits, poses, attitudes, whatever!

If you're going to go all in on this, do it in a way that doesn't suck!

Well, anyway.

I think Mecha Break is a game that is in its own way. The developers laid the foundation for a good game with the 6v6 shooter gameplay. But they haven't finished it. They've been pulled off thinking about story modes and the PvPvE mode and what we get is that none of these things are fully baked. Add to that some clumsily added free to play game monetization that makes players feel arbitrarily limited. I believe it discourages exploration and further gameplay.

Especially in the light of Marvel Rivals being praised for not pushing people into FOMO purchases, I feel like all these decisions are going to ultimately doom Mecha Break. Who will want to impulsively check the game out when new players are locked into more than an hour of forced tutorial and who will want to deal with all this monetization driven nonsense?

Because spoiler alert I remember playing Gundam Evolution and when that game launched with no way to ever grind enough unit unlock currency to get the whole roster, people dropped it! Game's dead!