Steel Battalion: Heavy Armour

In 2020 computer systems started failing. It started in southern USA and spread across the globe. Something with a taste for the silicon used in computers was destroying communications, commerce and ultimately modern civilisation.

A new Chinese-run United Nations is bent on global domination and the only thing that stands in their way is the American army and their Vertical Tanks, VT’s or Veets. As a Veet commander it’s your job to protect the civilised world, the army and your crew, destroying the enemy forces, their Veets and their infrastructure along the way. Are you ready, solider?

I bought the original Steel Battalion, with its ginormous controller, way back and as a ‘mech fan generally I was keen to see what had been created for the world for the ‘360. The use of Kinect promised revolutionary interaction with the environment; everything from popping up through the hatch to have a look outside through to slapping a hysterical crew member to puling levers to engage the Veet in action.

The gameplay, generally, is good. It’s sorta FPS. The pad-based controls work well and make sense to anyone who’s ever played a point and shoot game of any description. The action when fighting is well constructed and really does engender a sense of urgency in your actions, whether that’s finding cover or venting smoke from the Veet cockpit after a bad hit to avoid the crew choking to death.

After that, though, we start to hit problems. I died six times before completing the first mission. I put this down to the game having a steep learning curve and also thought that my setup wasn’t particularly conducive to effective Kinect usage so I persevered and decided that the next day I’d move the kit downstairs into the living room so I could move freely and sit at the right distance away from the screen and Kinect sensor.

What a waste of time. The problem is that the actions you have to take through the use of Kinect are all a little hit and miss. Let’s take venting the cabin of smoke as an example: in order to undertake this life-saving action you have to reach out to your right and pull out a panel. You then have to grab a handle and pull it downwards. Easy in principle but in practice fraught with the pressures of the action I ended up turning round to look at a team-mate, pulling out the panel and putting it away again, pulling out the panel and switching the lights on and looking out of the front view-port. I wasn’t panicking, I was trying to work within the parameters of the game to execute a required action.

Even the simple action of moving forward to look out of the letter-box view port to drive the Veet forward seemed to be too-difficult to achieve with consistency. Pushing both hands forward moved me up to the port and settling back into my seat caused me to move away again. Performing the actions to use the periscope for precision targeting would occasionally result in closing the shutter over the view port.

I don’t very often quit a game in frustration but I did with Steel Battalion: Heavy Armour – twice! There will be no third chance, I’m afraid. I love the way Kinect can be used but this doesn’t reflect that technology well at all.