War Tech Fighters

Genre: Space Combat Game

Players: 1

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Review:

War Tech Fighters is a game that combines the free-roaming Space Combat genre with the upgrade-and-customize elements of mech games, with players guiding their mech through vast open-space environments and taking on enemies both with guns and melee weapons.

The visuals in this game are pretty good for a smaller developer. They’re not likely to impress anyone, but they do a good job complimenting the vast feel of soaring through space. Having said that, you pay for it – both with a decent-size 4GB space taken up on your memory card and, more frustratingly, lots and lots of loading screens. It’s not enough to be truly burdensome, but it is enough to get annoying.

Also annoying is the way this game overloads the player with options in menus, instead of getting them gradually acquainted to them in a more fluid manner. There’s a lengthy tutorial in this game, but actual customization of your ship and researching missions just gives you a splash screen of text whenever you hit the appropriate menu, and if you’re exploring the hangar that serves as your home base, you’ll be greeted by one after another after another of these screens.

Also, this game uses teeny-tiny text that’s damn difficult to see on a big-screen TV, and it’s virtually impossible to read in handheld mode. It definitely feels like someone needed to do more work optimizing this game for the Switch.

The gameplay here is mostly pretty good, though I’ll give players a heads-up to say that this game is much more satisfying when played in first-person. The movement through space feels versatile and fairly fast, and the fact that you’re in a mech and not a ship is reflected in that, with players able to turn on a dime or easily circle-strafe enemies.

When delivering a finishing move or engaging in close combat with another mech, the melee weapons come out, and here’s where the game feels less effective. When using a sword as a finisher, regardless of what perspective you’re playing in it starts up a cutscene that breaks up the smooth action in a really frustrating way. This cutscene can be skipped, but it’s annoying to have to manually skip it every singly time you use this move to finish off a ship, and I really wish there were a way to just disable these cutscenes entirely in the menus.

When fighting enemy mechs, you engage in a sorta’ clunky fighting game with light and heave attacks and a shield button, and must time your use of these based on what the enemy is doing. It’s an interesting concept to break up the otherwise repetitive space shooting, but it’s so undercooked it just makes you want to get done with it to get back to the rest of the gameplay.

I really wish these elements had been worked more fluidly into the core gameplay here, because it would have been great to move seamlessly from firing off a barrage of shots into a melee combo, and this sort of variety in the game’s main form of combat would do a much better job breaking up the game’s otherwise somewhat monotonous mission structure.

It’s frustrating that I had to fill this review with complaints, because actually moving around and engaging enemies in combat in War Tech Fighters really is a blast – the main thing you’ll be doing when you’re playing the game is loads of fun… it’s just that this fun is dampened bit by bit as you encounter the game’s countless frustrations, like lacking tutorials, unreadable screen text, constant loading screens, and repeated interruptions to the very good combat with sub-standard melee fighting and an onslaught of cutscenes. Fans of mech games and those looking for a 3D space combat game on the Switch would still do well to give this one a look, just be prepared to take the bad stuff with the good.

tl;dr – War Tech Fighters is a Space Combat game where you’re flying through space and taking on enemies in a fully-customizable mech. The space combat and mech customization here are both excellent, but those elements are weighed down by numerous frustrations like constant loading screens, repeated cutscenes during combat, unreadably tiny menu text, and sub-standard melee combat. Fans of space combat games and mech games should still give this game a look, but others may find its flaws make the game hard to get into.

Grade: B-

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