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On paper everything sounds pretty good, as the game does offer up 35 missions of mech-based action and a Horde Mode where you’ll fight against waves of enemies until you drop. Along the way you’ll pick up a variety of upgrades that you can use to trick out your mech and those of the rest of your team, tuning them into a formidable mechanized fighting force. You’ll want to regularly go and explore what new weapons and boosters you have, then taking a spin in your revised mech and seeing which weapon systems and combinations work best for you. Missions will have some variety in terms of tasks but for the most part the focus on mechanized action and carnage doesn’t go away. You’ll move around the map to objectives, whether they’re enemy units, checkpoints you need to control, or places you’ll need to set up equipment… but for the most part you can expect enemy mechs, tanks, and aircraft to stand in your way. You’ll start each mission with 3 additional mechs on your team, and have some limited ability to tell them what to do, but their contributions are generally pretty limited and you’ll need to take on the lion’s share of the combat action… which is probably for the best. While all of this can seem both engaging and exciting the biggest issue is that in execution no matter what your objectives are or how you reconfigure your mech there’s a general sameness to everything you do. If you perform poorly or choose systems that don’t suit you there’s no doubt you can fail to be successful but as chaotic and action-packed as things tend to be on-screen that excitement didn’t usually translate into the play experience nearly as much. Taking down a giant mech or completing a tough mission was still rewarding but a lot of the combat is just spamming one weapon, switching to another, and taking out masses of enemies in a way that feels pretty sterile. Perhaps most disappointing is the Horde Mode. For all of the units it puts on the screen for you to take out, and it can quickly get challenging, there’s just not much of a thrill to taking them out after a while because it all feels pretty generic and one-note. Overall, if you’re feeling the need to mech up and have some destructive fun Assault Gunners HD Edition could be a good match for you if you temper your expectations. In terms of both presentation and overall action this feels like a last-gen game at best, but probably even further back than that. Its sensibilities simply aren’t very evolved, you’re going out to destroy everything in sight and doing so feels far more vanilla than you may expect. That said, for the moment there aren’t many options anything like it on the console for now so depending on the fix you’re looking for it could be a good fit.
Justin Nation, Score:Bad [5.5]