Vox Machinae (2018)

The first and only mech game I played was Mechwarriors 4: Mercenaries decades ago. I loved how the game made you feel like piloting a lumbering beast. With its complex controls, I had to use every finger and every key on the keyboard just to walk around.

For whatever reason I never played another until I found this old, relatively low-budget VR title on sale. Being a multiplayer-only game with a recently-added single-player mode, I didn't have big expectations. But it turns out it surprisingly good.

Now, a lot of what I will have to say needs to be tempered by the fact that this is a very janky title with lots of issues. Character animations are genuinely horrifying, arms contorting in impossible poses, hands clipping all over their bodies. The way your own legs twist around unnaturally when you walk is the stuff of nightmares. Enemy and ally AI during combat is hit and miss, and I had to restart missions a couple of times when convoys got stuck on the terrain. There's no repair system, which might make sense in multiplayer, when you fight until your mech is destroyed and respawn again (I suspect) but not in single player, when you might finish a fight without a leg and have almost no way of continuing the mission by moving to the next waypoint.

But I think that the good overcomes all those genuine problems.

The fighting itself is really good. With a cockpit full of little details and movements (although I would liked the buttons and levers that decorate to be interactive) the immersion is complete. The mech are weighty and there's some strategy in how you position yourself and attack. There's no munition but you need to keep an eye on your heat gauge and space out your shoots lest you overheat your mech and enter a cooling phase in which you become a stationary sitting duck for a while.

Movement also has it's ins and outs, since your building-size walking armoury also has jetpacks which are crucial to traversing the uneven terrain and moving quickly around the battlefield. Jetpack fuel is anther gauge you need to worry about, although I would've like it to refill more quickly outside of battle so the quasi-platforming segments didn't involved me waiting several seconds every time I botched a jump.

In essence, the piloting feels crunchy and good.

But I was surprise to see that you don't spend the whole time inside the cockpit; a sizeable part of the game is spent walking around the ship and talking to the contorting crew. Kind of like Mass Effect with no dialogue wheel. There's a couple of Yes-no answers at the beginning but they are all but dropped after a few missions in favour of linear conversations in which you have no input. Your character is mute, but your "AI buddy" does all the talking.

The quality and quantity of dialogue is pretty astounding for such a small title. Characters have several lines of dialogue for each section, which sometimes evolve based on what happens. In an early mission at one point one character ordered me to take it slow and snipe a mech from afar. After we won the battle, another character praise his strategy. But I died and had to restart and this time I accidentally rushed in; now the dialogue changed as this character conceited that sometimes rushing in works.

The ship itself feels like an actual working ship. Being cramped, full of hoisted boxes and with ladders that take advantage of the vertical space, it makes for a very plausible mining starship.

What you do there is less exiting. Besides just talking, there's a lot of literal fetch quest. A character might ask you to bring them something, you walk a couple of steps to get it and bring it back. Towards the end it gets a bit ridiculous, when in the middle of a rescue mission the captain decided to throw a pace-destroying, plot-stretching party and you're forced to run around the ship looking for party supplies.

I loaded the game up expecting a passable mech piloting sim and found a charming and horrifying romp with solid mech fighting.

I'm very surprised by how much I'm enjoying the game. Besides the mech battles, the story is so much better than it needed to be. There are characters with distinct personalities, they talk with eachother about stuff and dialogues change depending on situations. There's also a surprising amount of dialogue and of good quality both in writing and in acting! They even react to stuff that happens around them. Like the time there was an issue with the robot character during one of his fetchquests and other characters had several lines of dialogue talking about that.

The ship is also well design. It's got a lot of veritcality and cramped spaces, which make for a plausible starship more so than the expansive and flat ones of other games.

All of that goes a long way in forgetting that character animations are horrors beyond human imagination.

This was super cheap on steam and decided to give it a chance since it had been a minute (read: decades) since I played a mech game.

It's got some rough edges, such as weird animations, but so far it's solid. The mech works pretty well with my stick and combat feels crunchy and big. It's slow, but that's expected.

Yo my surprise, there are also walking around sections. You move around the ship talking to the crew. Feels a bit cut-rate Mass Effect with only yes-no answers.