Mech Rage is a game developed and published by Drageus Games in December 2018. The game is on the Nintendo Switch, and Steam. I paid forty-nine cents for the game on Nintendo Switch, and it is $9.99 on Steam. This game has as much plot as a 2D platformer that was released in the 90s. You're a man named John that has to defend our space station against aliens that don’t look like aliens. Since the plot is out of the way, let’s dive into the game.
The game plays like a twin-stick shooter. You move with the L-stick, aim with the R-stick, and use your primary gun with the ZR trigger. You also got a secondary gun that's shot using the ZL trigger, and you have a dash that is activated using the L Trigger. The controls are nice, the game feels similar to Centipede Infestation, a game I reviewed three months ago. The secondary gun has limited ammo, while the primary gun can be shot infinitely, or at least you would think, but I’ll get back to that later. I rarely used the dash, and I don’t think it's that useful. You can buy new primary, and secondary weapons by collecting bolts throughout the level that are dropped by killing aliens and destroying things.
The game is room based. You go into rooms, and kill all the aliens in the room, to go into a new room. This makes the game sound linear, but there is some backtracking required, as there are split paths, but the game is pretty t\ame with this. There are a variety of aliens to kill with some aliens that just run around, to aliens with big guns, to aliens that split apart. The aliens are fine, and by killing aliens, and breaking things, you can get bolts, and three types of cubes. The yellow one refills ammo for secondary weapons, the white one is a shield that makes you invincible and the green ones restore your health, which is very important. Finally here are upgrades to improve your mech that range from longer shield time to more ammo for secondary weapons.
I think it’s finally time to address the one part of the game that ruins the entire game for me, it’s the difficulty. Mech Rage is hard, even on the easiest difficulty, and sadly it’s not a fun kind of hard game, it’s an unfair kind of hard game. Let’s begin with unfair rooms. Some rooms will have so many enemies and enemy spawners that it’s hard to get track of what is going on, leading to death. This isn’t the worst since once you know what to expect, you should be fine, but there's a problem with that, I'll touch on later. The game also likes to throw undodgeable obstacles since as invincible turrets, which is fun. You're supposed to use the dash, but the dash doesn’t really even help much anyway since it’s only a short movement. However, the biggest issue is when you enter a room and die, you will have everything you had entering the room. This doesn’t sound so bad, but let’s say you enter the room in low health, and it has a lot of enemies. When you die you can restart in the room, but you will also have low health. This means a room could be near impossible if you can't heal, and not every room will have health. What makes the health thing worse is that when you use your primary weapon, you will actually lose health, which makes no sense, and shouldn't be a design element. This problem means that when you die, you will be forced to either beat the room on low health or restart the level. I hate being forced to replay levels in games, especially when I don't like said level. I gave up on this game, it wasn’t that fun to me.
I don‘t recommend Mech Rage at all. The game is boring, and I feel it is unfair with its difficulty. Don’t buy this game on sale as I did, and never buy this game at the full $9.99 price tag, it’s not worth your hard-earned money. Unfortunately for me, this publisher has a lot more Switch shovelware, so I’ll probably be covering them again on this blog.
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