Armed to the Gears Demo

Being in charge of multiple units at once is a great way to put your wildest strategies to the test, especially in games that reward you for being clever and finding new uses for your soldiers. However, strategy games sometimes feel a bit too impersonal, given the fact that you just give the orders and wait for the troops to do their job while you watch.

Armed to the Gears is an interesting hybrid between tower defense, strategy and action, which means that besides defending your base and placing turrets to deal with enemies you also get to control a unit directly and explore the map at your own pace. The game is in a pretty rough shape at the moment, but then again it’s too early in the development phase to draw hard conclusions.

You control an engineer in a powerful mech suit, who must conquer energy generators around the map and protect them from constant enemy attacks. In order to capture generators, all you have to do is stand near them for a few seconds, which is as straightforward as it sounds. On the other hand, the hard part is keeping them, because more and more enemies start to appear as you continue to explore the map.

The energy you get from generators allows you to deploy turrets, and you can place them anywhere, which is a great touch. Thus, you do not have to stick to predefined spots and limit your tactical options, although all this freedom can be a bit much for beginners. Your suit can also get damaged by enemy shells, so it’s wise to repair it every now and again by standing near generators.

The turrets come in multiple forms, each one of which is better suited against a particular type of enemy, be it flying robots or heavily armored mech suits. There’s not a lot of variety in terms of turrets, unfortunately, which is only normal considering the fact that this is still a prototype at this point. The graphics are nothing to write home about it, but the level design is actually commendable.

Even if Armed to the Gears is not exactly polished at this point, it’s certainly worth keeping an eye on the project just in case the developer keeps putting out updates. Hence, it would be nice to see a more refined product sometime in the future.