Heavy Gear Assault
You’ve seen the simulation and the arcade shooter, now you get the wacky rock’em, sock-’em robots.
It’s been years since I even thought about Heavy Gear, a franchise created in 1994 by Dream Pod 9 and scooped up by Activision in 1997 after it lost the rights to Mechwarrior. Now it’s landed with indie developer Stompy Bot Productions, which includes Mechwarrior 2 and Heavy Gear 2 vets, and their vision for the franchise transports it off the military beat and into MMA arena fighting.
That’s right … Assault mashes up extreme sports with e-sports.
Or at least, they will if their Kickstarter fundraising — which hasn’t actually launched yet — pans out. Certainly, the demo we saw in March at the Game Developer’s Conference showed promise, and not just because it’s the only game out there that features a mech with built-in rollerblades. Where Hawken and Mechwarrior both run on Unreal Engine 3, Stompy’s gone next-gen and built Assault in Unreal Engine 4, making it de facto the most technically advanced game on this list. That’s also a possible drawback; the demo PC ran painfully, case-meltingly hot by day two of its GDC appearance.
Still, for a demo that represented only two months’ development time, Assault looked good and played fairly smooth, and UE4 gives them lots of horsepower to work with. The finished game will include scenarios where you’ll blow off an enemy Gear’s limb, scoop it up out of the dirt, and beat the rest of that mech to scrap with it.
That plays into a few interesting wrinkles the Stompy Bot team has planned for Assault’s spectator mode. In keeping with the Roman Coliseum feel, spectators will shower accolades on combatants who impress them — winning that player additional money and corporate sponsorships — and derision on anyone who plays cheap. They’ll also use in-game currency to buy alterations to the arena in midmatch to spice things up or to put a bounty on someone’s head.
Hopefully, Stompy Bot will get the funding they need to show us all the ideas it’s generating around Heavy Gear. After all the hyper-intense robot-on-robot violence, we deserve to relax with a gonzo, audience-involved game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Hey, your Gear skates around like a heavily armed production of Starlight Express. How much pathos could there possibly be?