I’ve had my hands on a semi-exclusive preview copy of Luc Bernard’s turn-based strategy game, Mecho Wars for a while now. I know it’s kind of cliche to compare any portable turn-based strategy game to Advance Wars, but Mecho Wars is hard to liken to anything else. Just like as in UniWars, the touch interface works great in this game, and really feels just like playing Advance Wars on the DS with the stylus.
In the preview copy, there are two factions waging war against each other: The Landians and the Winged Crusade. Each have slightly different units that seem to do the same thing, and included is the standard load-out of different land, air, and ranged forces. While this is all fairly standard for the genre, what I like most about Mecho Wars is how the environment changes depending on the time of day.
One round of combat between both sides progresses the clock one hour, and at night all water freezes, allowing you to send your land units across what was once impassable terrain. This allows for some unique strategy both while defending your base and while you’re on the offensive.
Some of the included maps feature bridges that are only wide enough to accommodate one unit, creating an easy to defend bottleneck. That is, until the water freezes. While I haven’t had that much time to get very deep in to the single player campaign, the potential gameplay elements in a time-aware system are endless, and something I’m very excited to see more of.
The preview build comes packed with single device multiplayer, as well as an “Online” menu option which isn’t active– so, it remains to be seen if Mecho Wars can compete with UniWars’ full-featured online multiplayer.
I like everything I’ve seen so far, and Mecho Wars is definitely a game we will be looking out for in the future.
