SD Gundam Battle Alliance can be worth playing for big Gundam fans who just want another hack and slash. The camera also mostly sucks, as it wouldn’t let me see when I got too close to geometry, or it would start wigging out making it impossible to get my bearings. I’d just be looking at a ball of light before being hit by an attack I couldn’t see coming. The particle effects when you and your AI companions hit enemies are also often so large and flashy that, during boss battles, I couldn’t even see the boss half the time, which made it hard to dodge or block many of their attacks. These fights are rough solo as your AI compatriots aren’t useful and you can’t give them any orders beyond “use your super” - which may or may not hit. Most of the time, you go into a level, fight some mindless peons and then fight a boss. It doesn’t necessarily do SD Gundam Battle Alliance a lot of favors. There are options, but the combat they’re part of is unchanging and boring. You can do extra damage to enemies by hitting them in the back, plus you can perfect guard to block all damage and use a counter to do extra damage of your own. It gives the fights a weird start/stop rhythm that I couldn’t get into. But they have a ton of health and don’t stay down for long. You need to wait until their break gauge is almost empty and attack with a skill of your own to get them into a vulnerable state. Instead, there’s a weird break gauge that depletes when they use skills. They do a lot of damage and can’t be flinched. It reminds me of a Dynasty Warriors game.īut the bosses are worse. You walk up to them and hit them until they die. The regular enemies that populate the levels are basically fodder. You won’t be able to make use of it regularly during boss fights. Ranged Suits can immediately refill your shots and skills, but it requires half of a skill bar. All Mobile Suits have a gun, but it only has five or six shots before it has a lengthy reload. I also felt like it was necessary to almost exclusively use melee attacks, which is weird for a Gundam game. Not that the new Suits would play all that differently, mind you. I played as the Exia for nearly the entire game, as it was just too much of a pain to level a new Suit up to the level I needed. This means you have to dump a massive amount of currency into them before you can use them in your most recent missions. It’s true even if you unlocked them from a level 30 mission. This is compounded by the fact that, when you unlock new Mobile Suits in SD Gundam Battle Alliance, they start at level one. The combat here is much, much worse, featuring tedious, repetitive action. If you played any of the Gundam Breaker games and want more of that fast, satisfying, accurate action, you also won’t find it here at all. Plus you can’t upgrade or change out any of your weapons or skills, so the gameplay for each Suit never changes. The combat usually feels identical between a lot of suits. You can also use a launcher to knock enemies into the air. The melee and balanced ones tend to have just a three-hit combo and a strong attack that you’ll need to chain to get a combo going. There aren’t a huge amount of Suits included, and many of them play similarly. There are three categories of Mobile Suit in the game: melee, ranged, and balanced. There’s, naturally, a deeper mystery behind all of this, but it’s never interesting. These breaks cause the data of unrelated Mobile Suits and their pilots to manifest in the simulations of other histories. An AI representing G:Universe, a repository for Gundam-related war data, has pulled them out of their simulation to help repair “breaks” in the simulations. Juno Astarte and a random commander are pulled from a simulation of the EFSF’s war against Zeon in the year 0079. SD Gundam Battle Alliance has an awful lot of dialogue sequences. But it’s a far cry from what the dev achieved on much, much weaker hardware and it doesn’t offer the satisfying game feel I was hoping for. But after playing the game, I mostly just feel disappointed. I imagined what Artdink, which made great mecha games with extremely weak hardware, must be capable of with modern tech. When I saw it was attached to SD Gundam Battle Alliance, this quickly became one of the games I was most hyped about this year. The issue is, it’s been over a decade since the developer stopped making them. Gundam Battle Universe and the other Artdink Gundam games on the PSP are still considered to be some of the best entries in the franchise.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |