Homogenisation plagues any genre or medium as time goes on. Developers are more likely to follow a successful formula over branching out when met with tight deadlines, and it’s always best to build on a success than start anew. The unfortunate sacrifice in the name of more reliable successes is innovation (actual innovation, not the Ubisoft brand of the word) with the daring risks and messily ambitious designs of a genre’s formative years. When it comes to RTS games, few epitomise this lost art better than Metal Fatigue.
The main appeal of Metal Fatigue is how it approaches its subject matter, especially when it comes to offering a new dimension to engagements. While you might have the usual mix of tanks, troops, planes and giant sci-fi robots the map isn’t the usual single plane you’d expect. Instead, it’s divided between low orbit, land, and underground with certain units able to move up and down between the three. Shoot down a plane and it will fall down through one zone to the next. Fail to properly guard the underground, and suddenly a swarm of subterranean tanks might spring up inside your base.
Each zone provides unique benefits, as the land is the best location for buildings, while the underground is one of the most suitable areas for thermal energy from lava. Orbit, meanwhile, is the best location for solar panels and some of the game’s big weapons: Railgun platforms. Yet it’s not the railguns people will remember but the Combots; giant mecha you can wholly customise. Torso, arms, legs, the lot, can be swapped out and reworked to tailor make a new mecha. While each of the three factions has their own preferences – the usual powerhouse, sneaky one, and balanced mob – these can be retooled to fit a number of roles.
Unfortunately, where Metal Fatigue tends to go wrong is when its ambition exceeds its capabilities. Besides a mix of irritating bugs that makes certain swarm units more effective than they should be, the user interface is frustratingly spartan and poorly laid out. In addition to this, most winning strategies rely heavily on hard countering units and ambushes, a problem which is exacerbated by how often underground environments lead to bottlenecks and stalemates. Equally, the mechs themselves lack balance in terms of their parts, which allows camouflage torso and jump-jet-leg-equipped Combots to ambush and annihilate whole armies.
The end result of all this is a game which is brilliant, inventive and creative but is unrefined. It’s akin to playing Tiberium Dawn today, it’s entertaining but it needs a sequel to iron out all of the problems. It’s just a shame we never got that one. Still, for all of its problems, Metal Fatigue still has something to offer even modern-day players.
METAL FATIGUE / DEVELOPER: ZONO / PUBLISHER: PSYGNOSIS / PLATFORM: PC / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
