DigitalBattle.com

You know how I’m constantly railing against games that are all gameplay and no story?  How I wish, sometimes, plots would get deeper and richer and more fully realized? Well, today, I’ve seen the other end of the spectrum, and its name is Zoids Assault.

An extremely rare and hard to find title from the boys at Atlus, who for some reason don’t seem to be putting out a lot of product these days, Zoids Assault is a long and involved story, which is in turn part of a much longer and much more involved story, about two major nations at war.  The Guylos Empire and the Republic of Helic have been at each others’ throats for years, and this time around, we focus on two smaller appendages of these great bodies politic, Maroll and Jamil.  One of Marill’s military bases explodes under mysterious circumstances—which is odd enough by itself; explosions don’t tend to be mysterious, ever, they tend to be big, loud, and, in wartime, part of a series—and thus two covert operations teams are sent into their rival Jamil’s territory in response.  They’re probably on their way to do some damage in the best loud, grotesque military fashion available, but we’ll never know exactly what they were doing.  But what’s going on right now, with a cold war brewing between Maroll and Jamil, is irrevocably linked to events that happened around the end of the full shooting war between the Guylos Empire and the Republic of Helic, ten years prior.

Yes, you can start your groaning now, because the events you’re about to see and take part in are essentially a flashback.  One gigantic flashback.  In fact, the game will subject you to a whole lot of still pictures and people talking for about three full minutes before allowing you to even start playing the game.  Sure, the pictures are very nice and all, done in a lovely anime style, but for crying out loud, I wanted to start blasting things at SOME point, surely that could be understood!

But sure enough, the game decided that I was worthy to play it eventually and thus opened itself up.  And what I found waiting on the other side was…

…boring.

Catastrophically boring.  It played like a BOARD GAME with some animation.  Basically, I had to move pieces around a field in predefined moving patterns and use said pieces to attack OTHER pieces in turn.  Yes, it’s a real-time strategy game, and it’s very, VERY, short on action.  The worst of it was that the first level I played only offered up two basic types of weaponry, which means I had the whole spectacular choice of deciding if the enemy mechs (which all looked strangely like tigers, complete with mechanical tails, no less!) would get shot with a cannon or with a machine gun.  That’s it.  All the rest of the game is is deciding where exactly you’ll move your pieces to so that they can open fire on the OTHER pieces.  It’s like chess with a few explosions—it certainly moves about as fast.

And while the graphics are bland if inoffensive, and the gameplay trudges along with all the grace and wit of a rock attempting to dance, it’s not that the game is specifically bad, it’s just, well, unimpressive.

Zoids Assault fails to impress on virtually every level, but on the up side, it does fail to specifically OFFEND on just about every level, so if you like your games dull, slow-paced and thoroughly average, then go out and grab a copy.

If you can find one, that is..