Last month, two new mobile games were announced for two of the biggest and most iconic franchises in video game history. First we learned of Mega Man Xover, a “social RPG” that is supposedly coming out to celebrate the Blue Bomber’s 25th anniversary. Then we found out about Metal Gear Solid Social Ops, a mobile game that took place in the popular stealth series and was based around competitive card-battling.
Well, both titles had a trailer released during Tokyo Game Show this past weekend and were playable on the show floor, and the guys at Polygon were there to check them out.
As I suspected before Mega Man Xover is an auto-running game where you simply jump and shoot as your Mega Man moves on his own and enemies pour in from the right of the screen. Polygon’s impressions for the demo level were that the gameplay is pretty mindless and repetitive. You can catch the tiniest glimpse of gameplay in the following trailer.
However, the level culminated in a boss fight that rewarded them with a card. Yes, like Social Ops, Mega Man Xover has a card-battling component. The card-battling let’s you mix and match attributes from various characters and enemies from throughout the series’ history, and sounds like it might be pretty cool. Unfortunately that part of the game wasn’t available in this demo version of Mega Man Xover, just the boring run-and-jump stuff was.
Decidedly more interesting is the trailer for Metal Gear Solid Social Ops, which Polygon got their hands on as well. Unfortunately, being a story-driven card-battling game meant that Social Ops relies heavily on text, which was entirely in Japanese in this demo. Despite this, they were able to make it through an entire level and boss fight simply by tapping.
Whether that’s indicative of shallow gameplay throughout the game remains to be seen, but so far it doesn’t sound like the strategy-heavy type of experience I’d long for in a card-based Metal Gear Solid game. Still, there is potential based off of what you can see in the trailer, and the 3D cutscenes that play out what’s happening during the card combat look quite nice. At any rate, it looks about a thousand times better than Mega Man Xover, which probably isn’t saying much.
Despite two of my favorite video game series straying from their traditional gameplay types and branching out into card-battling and mobile social elements, I’m still eager to check them out. Both Mega Man Xover and Metal Gear Solid Social Ops should be launching sometime before the end of the year.
[Polygon]
