BE-A Walker

Genre: Action

Players: 1

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Review:

Note: This review has been directly sponsored by a kind donation from Jamie and His Cats. Thanks again for your generous contribution!

BE-A Walker is an Action game released on PC, mobile devices, and Nintendo Switch in 2020. Players control an AT-ST-style bipedal walking tank fighting off hordes of alien natives while they move from left to right.

The visuals here are quite good, with your Walker rendered in 3D with a lot of nice articulation, and the tiny natives taking the form of well-animated 2D characters, with overall a good amount of detail and color in the 2D environments. The game is fully-voiced and features a soundtrack that sounds like tribal beats.

The game’s story is adorably cliche, with a plot that reads like a mash-up of Return of the Jedi and James Cameron’s Avatar. Humanity has established a colony on an alien planet with a toxic atmosphere to mine a valuable resource, but is facing resistance from tribal natives who have become hostile and are fighting off the invaders. Humanity’s only tool that seems to be effective at all are the aforementioned mech-like Walkers.

While this premise had the potential to make you feel like you’re piloting a walking death machine against an army of hapless Ewoks, the reality of the gameplay is that these Walkers are both rather delicate and awkward. At the heart of this issue is the choice to make everything this mech does more difficult or less effective than it needs to be.

Your weaponry, for example, overheats quickly and takes a painfully long time to become usable again. Meanwhile, attacks by the natives not only whittle away at your mech’s armor, but they can also drain your oxygen, giving you two separate health bars to worry about, with either one depleting leading to a game over.

The game does realize that there’s some visceral pleasure to be had by squishing enemies under your walker’s feet, but it makes this unnecessarily difficult too – not only is movement awkward, but anything less than a perfectly-placed step won’t kill an enemy, but instead gently kick it a short distance away where it can resume its attacks on you.

This game constantly feels like it’s trying to be less fun than it could be, and one mission seemed to exemplify this. You’re tasked with delivering supplies through a base, with no enemies in sight. The only problem? There are tons of idiot humans mulling about, and accidentally killing any of them is an automatic failure. Do the humans follow any sort of pattern so you can anticipate safe times to walk? No, they often pause in place or clump together in groups, forcing you to wait. Is there some amount of “acceptable loss” if you make a mistake? Nope, one wrongly-placed foot means restarting the mission. Heck, even the mechanic where you accidentally kick people out of the way rather than stomping them seems to have been nullified in this mission – the one time you don’t want to stomp on people is the one time where your feet inexplicably become more lethal.

I’m frustrated by BE-A Walker because it seemed like such a slam-dunk of an idea. I mean, who wouldn’t want to have a little fun playing as the evil Empire and blasting away Ewoks? Unfortunately, this game repeatedly makes choices that make the player feel less powerful, more vulnerable, and more awkward. This is a game less about piloting a walking death machine and more about managing a pile of faults and weaknesses. I suppose it makes a good argument for why both the Ewoks and James Cameron’s blue aliens won, but that doesn’t make for an especially fun game.

tl;dr – BE-A Walker is an Action game where players pilot a bipedal mech and fight off hordes of tribal enemies. While the concept had great potential for destructive fun, the reality is that the game does everything it can to make players feel less powerful and more vulnerable. If you’ve ever wanted to blast away Ewoks as the evil Empire, this game seems designed to convince you that the reality of this dream is tedious, nerve-wracking, and more frustrating than fun.

Grade: C-

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