Beat except for final boss. This was a high action mech shooter similar to Armored Core, with high quality anime cutscenes. It was weird how the player was portrayed as more of a cute mascot that was never seen outside the mech, even giving the mech silly facial expressions. Everyone else was gritty and serious. Never seen the anime it is based on but did beat the PS2 game. Started on training and only got E for not killing all the targets, then jumped into the missions. I failed a few times until I got a handle on how to play. Doom style auto aim with no vertical look, but range was limited. Shoot had to be tapped not held, and easy strafing on the shoulder buttons. Didn't have to change the controls at all. The key to beating the mission was realizing my spider mech could walk on walls, so I took the high ground and ambushed enemies. It was also important to remember where health packs were. Every stage ended in a boss that required dodging various attacks. Mission 2 was another repeating style, the interior with narrow corridors. These were more slow paced linear stages, and here I learned how to switch to 1st person camera, which I preferred. I failed multiple times on the boss though and had to look up a guide. There I learned to hold shoot for homing missiles. I did it accidentally once so it was good to know how to do it on command. Missiles did more damage and had more range than the gun but taking any damage ruined the charge up and it was more awkward to press other buttons while holding and timing the charge. The key to beating the boss was staying out of the central water and jumping over his beam. Stage 3 pissed me the fuck off because it was destroying bombs with an extremely tight time limit. A limit so ridiculous that you had to already know exactly where every bomb was. Other than that the biggest problem was navigation. There was no map or even compass, and the little radar was only good for telling if enemies or pickups were nearby, so I wasted a lot of time being lost. They made this stage very tricky because some bombs were hidden up high and the last was inside a big storage tank. There is no way anyone could figure all that out within the time limit blind first try. After 20+ attempts I finally got everything except that last 1 but could not see how to get inside. Rather than keep trying I put in cheat code to unlock all stages, because fuck that bullshit.

Then the game introduced the next stage variant, the rail shooter. They were more difficult due to the fast pace and lack of cover. Then was an open stage about fighting a ninja mech. I did find it weird that lock on missiles worked against cloak. I got lost here so bad due to the lack of navigation. Enemies also respawned for some stupid reason, not just here but in general. I just noticed it the most here due to being lost. It did ruin the immersion to shoot down a helicopter or blow up a mech only to see it there again later. The game got better during the later stages, perhaps because I had mastered how to play. Circle strafing, dashing forwards and back, and being on the ceiling helped a lot. Machine gun turrets could not hit the ceiling at all, and the 2nd last boss had difficulty hitting the ceiling. I went back and did the 1st boss from the ceiling and he could not even hit me. The final mission was bad because it suddenly introduced platforming and instant death falling. There were only 4 jumps in a row that required dashing, and I had to switch to 3rd person camera. Even then I kept falling and having to restart the entire god damn mission. One of the rail stages had an optional path with some jumps but they were easy and failing only cost some hp. I only got past the final jumps once and thus only had 1 attempt on the final boss, which I lost. I would keep trying the boss but I got sick of starting the entire level over. Close enough to beating the game.

Fun game and certainly better than the PS2 game. I enjoyed the fast fluid movement and especially the wall and ceiling climbing. The game could have done a lot more to incorporate the climbing into the stages though. I liked the open nature of most stages, but that timed mission and the sudden bit of platforming at the end were major design problems. Checkpoints or manual saves during missions could have alleviated this, especially just before the bosses. The game also desperately needed some basic navigation tools. Still I could see having fun punching in level select to only do the good stages.

7.2/10