If you heard loud cursing in the Watford area last night, it could have been one of two things: 1) I swore at my (borrowed) Steam Deck while surreptitiously accessing the WiFi from outside a closed public library, as I did I don’t currently have broadband at home, or 2) I’ll next try to make heads or tails of Mech Engineer, in which you take control of a mobile undersea metropolis and send squads of carefully assembled robo-soldiers into semi-automated combat against squid-like alien fauna.
Building a mech is a Herculean task whose completion eludes today’s puny scientists, and Mech Engineer doesn’t aim to make life easier, regardless of its supposed status as a “means of fun.” Mech Engineer is honestly a game with an attitude problem. I realized this on day two of the game, when the interface coughed up a number of damage reports, presented as pieces of paper, which I then had to crumple up and throw away individually.
That interface! There’s an initially innocent 30 seconds where you think it’s just poorly designed. But then you realize it’s a creature with a nasty and labyrinthine purpose. Broadly speaking, it consists of a grid-based world map of Dwarf Fortressy, where you can travel with your city and send mech squads on missions, with tabs for researching new components, manufacturing them, and assembling them into Gundams the size of a handy chest. fill with pilots. There is a calendar that allows you to go to the next day. When you read those sentences back, it sounds practically transparent. Like XCOM but with extra robots, right? Wrong! Mech Engineer is nothing like XCOM. It’s like tying your shoelaces with scissors. It’s like doing puzzles in a cesspool after the death of the sun.
When I mentioned Mech Engineer to Graham, he said it reminded him of MicroProse’s older interface-em-ups, where the tension comes from the quasi-analog, high-fidelity obscurity of the simulation itself. I then left and discovered that MicroProse is indeed the publisher of Mech Engineer. I don’t have the benefit of Graham’s highly advanced years and associated experience of recreational discomfort, but to me Mech Engineer almost feels like a parody of MicroProse’s games, similar to Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.
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The interface is a sour swamp of irritating dials, submarine-like viewports, wireframe graphs and incomprehensible LED readouts, laid out in violent contradiction to current notions of ‘flow’, with several ways to switch between screens constantly vying for your attention fight. on-screen buttons instead of keyboard controls, a habit of miniaturizing key elements, and a relentless desire to overcomplicate every little interaction. Again, you might think it’s poorly made, but it’s clearly a labor of love. Each individual customization has a precise precision, from the monochrome shooting range simulator, to the authentic papery bestiary and landscape artwork, to the huge range of alarm SFX and mechanical reports that blare from the guts of the beast as you honk about pressing the wrong button. knob. bits and having your pilots slaughtered.
The actual mech engineering is deep and seems fascinating. For example, you have to construct, test and ignite a mech’s reactor before inserting it into the chassis, which feels vaguely cathartic – like putting the icing on a carefully optimized cake with subtly thinned out armor, optional energy shields and chonky Gatling guns that themselves can be adjusted and reduced to your satisfaction. The combat, meanwhile, is fairly hands-off and visually reminiscent of Duskers: you give your squad waypoints and play with things like distance as they fire at Space Invaders in real time on a scratchy radar screen, until they run out of ammo or crumple. under tension.
Your pilots have animated portraits, and my word: they make an ugly bunch even before you feed them to the aliens – not so much an army of Doomguys as a group of chatbot gargoyles staring at you from the abyss. Again, it all has an ordinary feel that piques my curiosity even as I neigh in fear, delete the demo in a frenzy, and race back to the library at midnight to download something friendlier, like Tiny Glade. Mech engineer! How I hate you, especially since I just realized Sin wrote you up three years ago – honestly, it sounds like the only thing that’s really changed in the meantime is that you can now buy the full thing on Steam.