Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor review

Two questions arise when confronted with the notion of Steel Battalion – a series of mech games controlled, and made infamous, by a dedicated controller that wouldn’t look out of place in a NASA vessel – joining the Kinect catalogue. First, why? Second, how? The former is the simpler to fathom: the push to make Kinect more appealing to ‘core’ gamers has attracted and encouraged both leading and slightly more obscure brands to gravitate slowly but surely towards the hardware. Cult-favourite developers are creators who’ve made their names by embracing a creative challenge and taking a risk, so it’s not particularly surprising to find them on the frontline of experimental design – Tetsuya Mizuguchi with Child Of Eden, Yukio Futatsugi with Crimson Dragon and now From Software with Steel Battalion.

As for the how, From Software – taking over development duties from Nude Maker, the team responsible for the series’ last two entries – cleverly employs a combination of Kinect and controller to command your character’s actions, and the movement and firepower of your vertical tank (VT) respectively. You toggle between maintaining the status of your VT via Kinect-controlled cabin switches and levers, and the more traditional navigation and pointing and shooting of the cannons with the controller.

To ease you in, the game opens with a wonderfully profane introduction to your squadmates. You can shake hands, catch an apple (you might choose not to – it has been urinated on, after all), and pick objects up through simple hand gestures. It’s a colourful, concise chunk of world and character building that doubles as a tutorial: an interweaving of gameplay and atmosphere that the game maintains throughout its course.

Inside the rumbling metal beast with your three new brothers in arms, things get more complex and interesting. You pull levers to fire up the VT and set it to high speed, for example, slam buttons to change ammo type, and observe your crew to receive quick quips (a swipe rotates your view around the cabin’s four fixed points of view). Reaching forwards with both hands lurches you up close to the window, giving you a view of the lie of the land and the best perspective for manoeuvring the VT. You can, however, manoeuvre it around at any time with the controller’s twin sticks. The tutorial is a comfortably bite-sized entry point to the world of Steel Battalion that will have newcomers asking what all the fuss was about. Where’s the punishing difficulty? Right around the corner, actually.

From the moment that the war on the game’s antagonistic ‘Uncle’ (a transparent stand-in for North Korea) begins, it’s down to the business of war. It kicks off with a Normandy-esque beach landing set in Manhattan that has you trundling your metal monster through rubble and rival VTs to tick off objectives. Missions are linear and filled with a cacophony of audio, from yelps and yeehaws to directions and orders. Chapters are essentially set-pieces with you dumped in the middle, scrambling desperately to hit the right levers and punch the right buttons on time. Anything more autonomous or freeform would be too taxing on the human brain, after all.

In the thick of battle, all that was simple to remember in the tutorial becomes an extreme memory test as the cabin rocks, rolls and fills with smoke, shrapnel and swearwords (as likely your own as those of your squadmates). Just as the ‘game’ in From Software’s Armored Core is the customisation of the mech itself, the game in Steel Battalion is operating and maintaining your VT. And, once your initial confusion passes, the game’s use of both Kinect and a controller leads to a heightened sense of involvement. The controller feels like a navigational tool, occupying an integral part of the mech, rather than some abstract pandering to usability.

Without in-game saves, the game keeps stages short and succinct, averaging around five to 15 minutes. You’ll spend much, much longer on them dying, of course, especially in the teething stages as you familiarise yourself with the cabin’s layout and learn the flow and routine of the pre-scripted events. Some of these scripted scenes are context-specific, though, adding the illusion of improvised play, such as a crew member popping the hatch and making a dash for it. Try to drag him back in and he may come back a gibbering wreck or a corpse; let him go and you’ll take heat from your crew. Such mini-events add to the tense, cluttered busyness of play: you’re kept so physically and mentally engaged by Heavy Armor that the effect is one of a control or engine room simulation as much as an action game.

The most heavily combat-oriented missions, such as seek-and-destroy or recon objectives, require a keen awareness of the environment and your distance, pitch and ammo stores. The challenge – in an echo of naval submarine warfare – is in knowing when to fire and when to flee. There’s not a major spread to the variety of stages, but the demands placed on you in your little metal box thoroughly compensate for that.

From standing up to pop your head out of the hatch and scan the environment (most of the game is played seated) to bringing down the periscope for precision sniping, the unfolding of events is each stage is memorable. But many lack the draw of return play once you’ve been through the hoops and uncovered their surprises. Like a thrilling but tiring rollercoaster ride, Heavy Armor isn’t something that you want to hop back on to immediately for another go.

While the relationship between Kinect and controller is well thought out and implemented, it’s no perfect marriage by any means. As the thick of battle proves – with your hands shaking and waving at the camera like a frisky mime in a hurry – the awkward positioning of levers and buttons, plus some occasional lag issues, can lead to punishing errors. Gripping the wrong lever can cost you an entire mission, since letting go to air-fumble your way to the right one can simply take too much time and too many motions. It’s a hardware issue as much as a design flaw, but it’s undeniably a problem for a game that’s built on reactions and response times.

A more pleasant surprise comes courtesy of the game’s distinct, confident and bombastic personality. From Software isn’t known for its deft hand with characters and cutscenes, but rather the quietude of its Souls universe and the deep-but-drab world of Armored Core. Here, however, we find the studio flexing some scriptwriting muscles and showcasing a flair for the cinematic. Dialogue may tick off war movie clichés (there are fist bumps and porno mags, of course), but it’s well-handled and delivered, with solid voice acting and choreography that adds to the sense of being marooned in the ruins of this near-future world.

Cutscenes are bloody, bold and sharply edited affairs – a reminder of the time when they simply punctuated action games, before the genre itself started to morph into a series of interactive cinematics. The story, one of the western world losing its grip on its own soil but fighting on nonetheless, perfectly resonates with the often exhausting experience of play.

You’re fighting a losing war in Heavy Armor, both in your living room and in the narrative. (As your commanding chief says at one point: “It may sound cruel, but that’s the world we live in.”) There’s also a beautiful, permadeath element to the game, one that’s more forgiving and inventive than the originals’ savewiping insanity. Your platoon consists of some 30 soldiers, each with a backstory that’s gradually revealed through letters that are unlocked as you progress. Lose a man in-game,  however, and you lose him forever – his face crossed off the group photo and, in a more literal sense than usual, another of your lives lost. It’s an emotive but subtle play on the traditional ‘lives’ concept, a system that From Software is making a habit of challenging and redefining with its projects.

With From Software now at the helm, there’s a new and self-assured personality to Steel Battalion. The series’ complexities had previously been shouldered by that gargantuan controller. But now the inputs have been reduced to a half-dozen Kinect-based actions and the standard controller, the unforgiving, unrelenting difficulty is shouldered squarely by the developer. Well, and you. This Steel Battalion is an assault on your senses and nerves: the battlefields of the game are gruelling, but it’s what happens inside the cockpit that really matters, the challenge of managing your VT as

best you can amid the tumult. With its unusual blend of Kinect and controller – of simple missions and complex control – Heavy Armor is a modern rarity: a game designed to be hard work. Whether that translates directly into it being a game for the ‘hardcore’ is debatable, but From Software has made the best of a bad situation and, aptly, delivered a game that asks you to do exactly the same. [6]