Alright. About to pass out. A bit too sick and too tired to continue tonight. Played a few missions. Enough to get the hang of controlling infantry, recon jeep, and tank. Even enough to particpate in one semi-large melee involving multiple unit types (tanks, recons, artillery towers, rifle infantry, and the dangerous bazooka infantry).
So far? I like. I dig the cartoony graphics (so colorful!), I dig the ridiculously proportioned characters in the cinematics. Hell, I even dig the equally exaggerated voice acting. Fits the theme like a glove. Even the music rocks.
So how does it play?
Surprisingly well, so far. The grunts run, jump, and shoot on a dime. It's easy to target foes, switch targets, and even go into a manual aiming mode (with R) in order to lead fast moving targets (such as those fleeing spy balloons!) Grunts have unlimited ammo, but reloads can take time. They'll even reload automatically if you leave off on shooting for more than a second. Neat. Lock onto an enemy with L, shoot with A. If you're locked to something, hitting a direction and B will allow you to perform evaside rolls. If you aren't locked to anything, B will jump.
Get close to a battalion of grunts, press X to whistle at them and boom, they're under your command. At that point you can target and lock an enemy with L and hit Y to give them all a command to shoot. Also, you can select individual units with the C stick (a little mini menu pops up) and give individual commands. Or, you can place the grunts that follow you in a strategic location and hit X again to release them from your immediate command. At that point, they'll stick to that position and defend it from interlopers. (They seem to fire more often and more effectively when under your command and directed with Y, however.)
Defeat soldiers, some of which drop med kits. Walk into a kit to heal, or leave it by and the more wounded of your battalion will help themselves instead.
If the close 3rd person view becomes to constrained (can happen with larger vehicles, such as tanks), you can hit left on the D-Pad in order to pull the camera far out and up, into an overhead/isometric view.
The vehicles themselves control rather loosely, particularly the lightly armored and barely armed Light Recons. Tanks, however, feel quite a bit more cumbersome and plodding, as you'd expect. Slow to fire too, but damn do the tank shells do damage.
I ripped through an enemy base, blowing up it's defensive towers (from which a constant stream of enemy rifle fire was peppering my poor grunts), tore through some Light and Heavy Recons which where slowing me down, occasionally helped my grunts in picking off enemy soldiers (though with the tank's slow rate of fire, it is difficult to hit fast moving and relatively tiny grunts.) Slammed some shells into nearby enemy ammo dumps, causing massive explosions to rip through their defenses. But once the enemy brought out their Bazooka Grunts (anathema to tanks), I definitely has to step up with commanding my troops. Had to manually target the Bazooka Grunts and hit Y to send my forces ahead to kill them before they tore up my tank too badly.
Took out one final ammo dump for the win.
Hell, that was only Mission 2 I think... or perhaps 3. My head hurts too much more to continue.
Wound up getting an A rating in both of those missions... or all 3, if I did indeed complete 3. I got 100% in Technique and Power for all of my victories... but only managed to hit in the 65-68% for Speed, knocking my average into the high 80%s. Enough for an A, overall, but... well, it'll take at least one additional replay to score higher in Speed ratings. That's definitely going to be the main challenge for scoring well. IIRC, Technique rates how many of your troops survive... Power rates how many of their troops died.
Woo. I like. Crazy potential.
The gameplay vaguely reminds me of a much more focused, linear, and MUCH more strategic Mercenaries. But it's really nothing like Mercenaries. Just vaguely feels like it, at times.
