Mech Rage

Genre: 2-Stick Shooter

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!

(Note: This game is included in Action Games Bundle (5 in 1), along with Bridge Strike, Event Horizon, Event Horizon: Space Defense, and Genetic Disaster.)

Mech Rage is a 2-Stick Shooter released in 2018 on PC and Nintendo Switch, with players taking on hostile aliens on a massive spaceship using a mech suit, which has both a primary and secondary weapon that they’ll be able to upgrade using in-game currency over the course of the game.

The presentation of Mech Rage is mostly pretty good, with decent 3D visuals that have some nice lighting effects backed by an appropriately intense cinematic soundtrack that does a good job highlighting the action. The one drawback here I have to point to is the game’s text-dialogue, which is some of the most cringe-inducing macho garbage I’ve ever seen in a game, seemingly written by a teenager. I don’t know if this was supposed to be a parody or satire or something, but if it is, it goes way overboard from purposely awful to just plain awful.

Unfortunately, there is one other flaw tied to the presentation that’s far, far worse than this – the loading times. This game has some pretty nasty loading times when you fire up the game and each level you start, but in addition to that, it takes 10-15 seconds to load up each time you enter a new room, and since this is a single-screen 2-Stick Shooter, you’ll be doing that a lot.

As if the constant loading wasn’t bad enough, enemies in this game are ridiculous bullet sponges that take far too long to take down. And since this is one of those games where the “difficulty” selection just changes how much damage enemies can take, selecting a harder difficulty just makes these bullet sponge enemies even spongier.

Also, while I mentioned the primary and secondary weapons earlier, that’s a bit misleading because your secondary weapon has extremely limited ammo, and you’ll be out after just a few shots unless you can get a refill. And while you can upgrade these weapons, it takes a while to earn enough in-game currency so you have anything resembling a good choice of options for upgrades.

Apart from all of those issues, Mech Rage is a pretty mediocre 2-Stick Shooter, with an emphasis on rooms with force fields and switches you need to hit to deactivate them. There’s just nothing interesting going on here, and that’s after you excuse the constant stream of groan-worthy text, the atrociously bad loading times, and the tedious bullet sponge enemies. If you’re looking for a decent 2-Stick Shooter, do not buy this game, because you won’t find one here.

tl;dr – Mech Rage is a game that starts out as a mediocre 2-Stick Shooter and just gets worse from there, with a constant barrage of cringe-inducing text dialogue, constant nasty load times, and absurdly tedious bullet sponge enemies. There is absolutely nothing here worth putting up with all that garbage, do not buy this.

Grade: D

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