Mechanicus

Whenever battles are depicted in video games, they rarely feature a believable reason for the said battle, because no two armies clash just to exchange shells with each other. Instead, most confrontations take place over the control of certain roads, bridges, resource-rich zones and vital cities. Hence, there’s always a clear goal for the combat, at least on paper.

Mechanicus is a simple shoot ‘em up in which your only purpose is to destroy enemies that try to attack power plants. However, the task is not as simple as it sounds, because the enemy waves get tougher to defeat later on, not to mention the fact that you are always outnumbered. On the other hand, the game is very basic in most regards, as well as annoyingly slow sometimes.

To begin with, there’s little-to-no background story to explain what and when, although that’s not usually necessary in a shoot ‘em up anyway. However, it feels like you are thrown in the middle of a battle you do not care about, which is a tad annoying. The interface can be disorienting sometimes as well, depending on how much experience you have with the genre.

Your only task is to move around the map and shoot enemies, which are small and difficult to spot sometimes. To make matters worse, the controls are imprecise and incredibly laggy, which is the last thing you want in a shoot ‘em up. The ship turns very slowly, and it takes forever to move around the map when you cannot slide from side-to-side, only forward.

As for the graphics, they are not exactly bad, but there’s nothing nice about them either. In fact, the level design is a bit repetitive, and the same goes for the gameplay as a whole. Since you just have to resist wave after wave of enemies, the action gets repetitive after only a few minutes. On the other hand, you can upgrade your ship with various components, even if this barely changes anything.

All things considered, Mechanicus can still make something of itself if it receives a few updates in the near future, otherwise it won’t have a very long life. Moreover, it needs variety to keep the players engaged.