War Robots Review (Android) Best Mobile Mech Sim?

For me, the definitive model of how a mech simulator should be has always been Mechwarrior 4. Junky walking tanks, Mechs slower than PS4 updates, and weapons that could level an entire horizon from the face of history, that you have to aim with the precision of a Bluetooth stylus guiding a laser to perform brain surgery. This game is pretty close enough, but like with most games primarily on Mobile platforms, this game is modeled almost exclusively around micro-transactions.

Gameplay


Recommend getting a tablet for the game.

If you've been as bored as I have with what modern Mobile gaming has to offer these days, well hold on to your seat, because this game actually has a multiplayer mode. In fact, the entire game precariously revolves around online competition. There is no story, there is no offline map... Just a series of like 4 or 5 maps with exactly one type of game mode: Capture the beacon. For those of you who don't know what that is, it means you have to stand over a series of beacons for a certain amount of time to gain territory. With a game mode so basic and mech combat so slow, you could be forgiven for thinking that this game is boring. It isn't. I'm like 15 days into this monster of a money-eating time wasting heroine injection of a game that I spent more time playing than I did writing on this website.

14,000 gold is $100. I'm just gonna let that sink in.

Make no mistake about it though, this is one of those pay-2-fun games I often talk about on RageFor. The ones where you won't really make a significant impact on the enemy team unless you:

A: walk really close to a much larger mech on your team, providing fire support,
B: Play and die a lot, and barely make enough silver and gold to be able to afford a Starbucks coffee, while waiting hours -and sometimes entire days- for a weapon upgrade, or...
C: Drink the Mobile gaming cool aid and spend money on shit, which is what I inevitably did.

If you see the actual store itself, you'd know that if a Google Play sale isn't going on, (It's basically like a Steam sale, but for casuals...) the going rate for 500 gold is about $4.99. That's about 3 cents per gold in this game, and there are heavy and light class mechs in the in-game store that are at least 1500 to 5000 gold. We're talking mechs that you can't pay for in silver. What this means is that the best mechs in the game are 15 to $25. No, that wasn't a typo... Given this game's age group, excluding some anomalous hypothetical like Barron Trump's father giving the first kid a small loan of a million dollars, I don't see parents of my generation being comfortable paying that much for their kid's imaginary walking death machine.

The Natasha Sucks balls.

An important thing to keep in mind here, is that despite some of the mechs being expensive, a lot of them suck really bad anyway. The crowning jewel of which is the 1.7 million silver-costing Natasha heavy mech. You could be fooled into thinking that its morbid Tumblr feminist obesity and Soviet-era World War II design would make this an awesome long-range death machine, but two of the hard mounts on this heavy mech are light, and contain missile launchers about as effective at stopping an enemy as throwing a paper airplane at a moving Dodge Charger. The only heavy mounted weapons are two Nashorn artillery canons on each shoulder that only mildly annoy an opponent, like sitting next to the loud Italian family at an Olive Garden restaurant, and reload about as quickly as Darwin's theory of evolution.

You would be forgiven for thinking that buying premium gives you an advantage, but the odds of you earning enough gold to purchase literally anything after level 19 is virtually impossible. No amount of premium membership is going to change that. It's like wanting to be a PC gamer while working at a McDonald’s restaurant full time; you can't afford jack shit if you have to buy it in gold. The truth is, you're better off just buying the fucking gold, but seriously... $19.99 for 6500 gold is pretty god damn steep. I probably wouldn't have bought the entire game for that much money.

One of the more foreboding issues with mobile multiplayer games is that there is no way at all to communicate with your team. You can't text, you have no voice chat... Nothing. Besides being tempted to call some of them morons, there is no way to plan an effective strategy for victory. I can't really think of a way around this though.

Controls

The controls are so basic and self explanatory that it strains the necessity for a splash screen to tell you how to use them. controls are big, graphically illustrated in a way that make logical sense, and are a different scale, depending on the device you play it on, so you don't end up with controls that are too big, or too small.

Problem here is not so much with the controls that the game has, but the controls that are missing. For example, the vast majority of the guns new players are going to be exposed to are automatic weapons. These guns have to reload from time to time. Problem is, there is no reload button anywhere on the screen. This prevents gamers from performing what is called a tactical reload, where you seize an opportunity to reload a gun while they don't need to use it. Since most reloads take like 10 to 15 seconds at best, getting into a firefight with an almost empty magazine could get your shit kicked in, when you're just standing there waiting for your gun to finally reload so you can hit back. This game needed a reload button like a diabetic needs medical insurgence.

There are certain items that mount to the side of your mech like shields that you can use to protect that side of the body, but they only work so long as they are positioned perfectly in the way of oncoming fire. that means if someone is shooting right in front of you, you have to twist the torso of the mech to position the shield in front of you. Problem is, you can't see jack shit in front of you when you do that. Since this game doesn't have a look option the way, say, the MechWarrior franchise does, you are going to be walking blind, trying to hold up the bullet sponge you substituted a gun for. I've managed to make it work, but its inconvenient, to say the least.

Verdict

For all intents and purposes, this game should not be fun, but it is. It's slow, you can't aim up or down, and you remain largely ineffective as a mech pilot unless you lose patience in the timer system and start stealing your parent's credit card information. All that in mind, I am still playing it. If this game is nothing at all, it's addictive.