Welcome to The Top Shelf, a weekly feature wherein I sort through my extensive PS2 collection for the diamonds in the rough. My goal here is to narrow down a library of 185 games to a svelte 44: the number of spaces on my bookshelf set aside for my PS2 collection. That means a whole lot of vetting and a whole lot of science that needs to be done - and here in the second round, that means narrowing our laser focus to one game per week (at least). Be sure to check out the Case File Repository for more details and a full list of games/links!

Before we start here, it's time for a confession. Robotech: Invasion, you probably don't recall, was not one of the games we evaluated during the first round of eliminations. It is, in fact, a game I found on a long-forgotten CD spindle that I had set aside for PS2 games I was intending to play before buying a PS3, back around in 2007/08 when my purchase of the latter was imminent. Since most of my PS2 boxes are currently stored away, I've been using my DVD wallet to determine what was in my collection - this spindle, however, contained an additional six games that I didn't account for. I'll be tossing these in with the rest of the second-round candidates, because those games and these spindle buddies have something in common: they're all games I had intended to check out before retiring the PS2 for the foreseeable future.

Robotech's an unusual case of an anime being adapted for American TV by changing large swathes of plotting and characters and especially names of locations and concepts, and each of the three "seasons" of Robotech were drawn from a separate sci-fi mecha anime series with some throwaway story justifications to connect all three together. Robotech: Invasion draws from the third season, in which an advanced alien civilization first introduced in the show's second season travels to Earth and effortlessly conquers it, with the remaining human survivors fighting an apparently hopeless battle to reclaim their homeworld. This is more or less true for the anime series that the second Robotech season is based on, Genesis Climber MOSPAEDA, though certain plot elements - including the ultimate plan of the aliens - has been changed to suit the canon of the earlier Robotech entries. I've never been a particular fan of mech anime, so I missed out on this whole ridiculous westernization process, but I've seen it before in the likes of Samurai Pizza Cats and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, not to mention a dozen video game examples like Chubby Cherub and Yo! Noid. Remarkable, but not unprecedented.

Robotech: Invasion is, in many many ways, inspired by Bungie's seminal shooter Halo: Combat Evolved. The game was a 2004 release, released the month before Halo's own sequel, and there's signs of just how far the console FPS genre had come since Halo injected a panoply of new ideas and quality-of-life improvements into same. It's telling how much better Robotech: Invasion - a so-so game according to review outlets of the era - has held up compared to the critical darling (relatively speaking, anyway) that was the 2002 game Medal of Honor: Frontline, which I covered a few weeks ago on this feature. There are inverted camera controls that you can toggle (they are on by default, even though "inverted" would suggest it was the non-standard option), there are shields which regenerate and health that does not, there's a form of lock-on that lets you adjust your aim slightly to hit smaller weak points, we finally have a PS2 shooter that uses separate sticks for camera and movement, and the progress indicator is far better realized here as it works on a constantly updating node system that is better for guiding the player around windy paths and obstacles.

In addition to all that, Robotech: Invasion has a few more heavy hitters in its corner. The first is a soundtrack by Jesper Kyd, of Assassin's Creed and Hitman fame, which is about as close to his take on a Halo orchestral synth soundtrack as he was probably legally allowed to attain. The second, and the chief reason the developers focused on this particular season of the Robotech show to adapt, is the Cyclone suit. A combination powered exoskeleton and vehicle, the Cyclone allows the player to switch between two modes: the standard first-person mode, in which the Cyclone is in "armor" mode and provides the player with a regenerating shield to help them survive firefights; and the motorcycle mode in which the player can quickly cover a lot of ground in open areas at the cost of having zero shields, and relying purely on their limited stock of health. There are stretches of the game where the player can simply drive past enemies to complete vital objectives faster, such as speeding around canyons to plant explosives at key points while avoiding a lot of constantly spawning enemy waves, but a slower on-foot approach is often the safer one. Most of the time this transformation mechanic is moot, as you're inside buildings or tunnels and can't use it. All the same, it's a fine example of a risk vs. reward system that predates a similar feature in Transformers: War for Cybertron. It does, however, mean that every Cyclone suited character has these dumb giant tires hovering behind them.

Beyond all those positives, conversely, the game exhibits the same level of soul-crushing tedium that, well, the original Halo did. You spend the whole time wandering across a dull planet full of nondescript wastelands and grasslands, occasionally dipping inside vaguely alien-looking but ultimately equally nondescript buildings. There's a limited assortment of foes who keep popping up in regular waves, and a limited number of weapons with which to take them down. Worst of all is the meandering plot, which never stops for pause and constantly has you reaching a new area and completing an objective only to be informed over the radio that you need to head somewhere else, and because there are no distinct episodes or arcs with a compelling start, middle and end the whole game instead just feels like a long, contiguous slog across a planet full of aliens that are boring to shoot at to save a small cast of faceless human soldiers in power armor that you can't care about. There was a reason I took a long sojourn from FPS games during this time, and that was because of the ubiquitous influential effect Halo had on the games to follow, at least until Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare assumed the "everyone copy this guy" mantle in 2011. For as much of a pain as it was to play Frontline, it at least bookended each level with a mission report and the sense that the war was moving along thanks in part to your efforts.

Rating: Eliminated.

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