Robotech: Battlecry

There have been games based after popular anime cartoons, books, and movies since as far back as gaming goes. The quality of these games, however, is often questionable. While a few games may exceed expectations and live up to the hype of the show, often these games fall short. This often results in the same fan base buying the games, the fan base of the show for which it revolves around. You’ve seen it happen with .hack, you’ve seen it happen with many of the endless stream of Dragonball Z games, and more often that not you’ll see it happen again with Robotech.

While quality gameplay is provided, it’s often hindered by repetition. Robotech is an action game in which you pilot what is a gundam like vehicle known as a “Veritech”. These Veritechs possess the unique ability to transform into one of three forms: Guardian, Battloid, and Fighter. Each mode is equipped by with a special feature, the Guardian can pick up items, the Battloid can snipe, and the Fighter can launch decoys to distract enemy missiles. Seeing as you can switch between each of these modes at any moment, each mission is free to be tackled as you see fit, mostly. You see, this game can essentially be broken down into 2 types of levels, urban and flight. In urban missions you patrol the streets fighting, and in flight you often don fighter mode and take to the skies. The catch is, fighter mode is useless in urban missions, and vice versa. Another thing I don’t believe the game paid attention to very closely is the weapon heat. You cannot fire your gun for too long or it overheats. Unfortunately, many of you will discover this can easily be overcome by simply tapping the button. Also, many of the missions require you to escort something to a certain location relatively unharmed. This can become both tedious and frustrating as you play level after level protecting a “cat’s eye” or “destroid”. While many of these flaws can be overlooked, they do hinder the overall experience of the game.

The plot in Robotech is a fairly basic concept. Aliens attack your planet, you must try and defend it, and while I’m not familiar with the show, I can assure you that fact really doesn’t hinder from being able to fully understand the plot. The voice acting is done alright, and you see basic anime pictures with accompanying voices after each chapter, which is mainly how they carry the plot. The plot has quite the number of twists, and often was my only encouragement to bear another level of protecting something. Given the circumstances, Robotech delivers a quality story without requiring any back knowledge of the show.

The controls, on the other hand, are something that needs to be brought up. The controls will take a while after the training to grow accustomed to, and often confuse during critical moments. You move with the left thumbstick, boost with A, and strafe with L and R. All three of these buttons must be used together, successfully, to move with ease and dodge enemy fire. While this may sound simple, it can often times get to be quite the hassle. X is for primary fire, B shoots secondary fire, and Y is for your forms special ability. Another problem arises, however, with the controls for switching targets. You will have to do this almost constantly, yet the game sets these controls to the black and white buttons. This may not seem like an issue on the Controller S, but on the old school controllers, you actually need to move your hand a bit to hit one of these buttons. Managing this and the movement controls at the same time can really become annoying at times. I often found I could manage the controls alright as long as I didn’t think about it; you kinda have to wait until they become second nature to you. This shouldn’t be the case though, and hinders gameplay often.

The sound in this game isn’t worth writing home to mom about, is certainly better than some games around. Robotech has a very basic soundtrack, music that usually fits the mood and setting, and the main theme is actually quite encouraging. The only problem with the sound is the sound effects. Not the actual in game effects like explosions, those are fine. The problem comes from the noises Jack (the main character) makes whenever you kill an enemy. You have no idea how many times you’ll hear cheesy one liners such as “come back when you have some skill”, “I just took those guys to school”, or my personal favorite “Jack the giant killer!”. These seem entertaining at first, but before long you’ll find yourself turning down your volume, or not defeating enemies, whichever you find easiest.

This game can be replayed, though considering it is fairly long and most missions are the same, im skeptical any of you may want to do this however. The only saving grace is that through playing the game more than once you can unlock certain medals based on criteria you meet in the game, such as defeating a set number of a specific type of enemy. These medals unlock you new Veritech models for both use in single and multiplayer mode, paint coats, and movies. The multiplayer is enough to get you by if you’re bored with a friend, but the main focus of this game really is the single player.

The graphics are very routine graphics, with the characters in a cel shaded fashion. You will often see the same texture, or rather, what appears to the same level, used over again. This can get old, especially after struggling on the same mission for 20 tries. Not much can be said about Robotech’s graphics, and whether that is good or bad remains up to question.

Robotech is on most scales an average game, one that will provide fair amounts of entertainment, but certainly won’t stick out as anything fantastic. Fans of the series should pick it up, as for the rest of you, renting should get you by just fine.