Mech media of all forms has always appealed to my inner child. It consists largely of giant robots blowing each other up; what’s not to love? As such, I am eagerly awaiting the release of Daemon X Machina after seeing the trailer! I don’t want to wait for its release to blow some mechs up on my Switch though! In the meantime, I had the opportunity to review Assault Gunners HD Edition to help tide me over. While fun, the game has also left me itching for a more refined mech experience.

Developer: Shade (… or Honey Parade Games? See below in review)

Publisher: Marvelous Entertainment

4-5 hours played // Review Copy Provided // $9.99 ( + $4.99 DLC)



The first few missions of Assault Gunners are focused on training. These loosely-guided tutorials provide the player with the opportunity to familiarize themselves with their mech’s systems, the different objective types, and commanding your squad. By the time these missions are completed, the player has already had the opportunity to obtain at least a dozen different upgrades.

Missions in the game typically take no longer than five minutes to accomplish. However, I found I failed every fourth mission because the big bad would show up, stronger than before, and wipe my squad out. This was because I hadn’t taken the time to upgrade my mechs, as I wasn’t struggling with the pathetic henchmen thrown at us until then.

Training with the squad.

The basic mech mechanics are centered around shield energy and stamina. Each mech in your squad is equipped with shield energy that protects its stamina. While shield energy regenerates automatically, stamina only regenerates with pick-ups dropped by slain enemies. The player is able to boost their mech’s speed for a short time at the expense of shield energy. Once the player’s mech’s stamina is depleted, it’s game over.

If any of your squad’s mechs’ stamina is depleted, they retreat. I found this system somewhat dated. Why opt for health pickups instead of some sort of repair system? Unless the player’s squad is surrounded and overwhelmed, boosting in combat doesn’t make sense. I felt this mechanism unnecessarily slowed gameplay when a separate fuel resource could have been used in its place.

This bad boy can fit so many weapons and upgrades!

The mechs are also equipped with four different weapons: the main weapon, a sub-weapon, a shoulder weapon, and their fists. The main and sub-weapons pull from the same category, which varies from your basic assault rifles and shotguns to plasma rifles and laser vulcans. The shoulder weapons are the player’s heavy weapons, such as homing missiles and grenades. Fists can be augmented with knuckles. This provides players have plenty of options for accomplishing the game’s primary objective type, eliminate all enemies!

There are many options for developing the chassis of each mech. Take care though, you must pay for upgrades before learning what bonus they provide!

The mechanic that really shines in Assault Gunners is the mech customization. The player is very quickly provided with many options for tweaking each mech in the squad. Each mech has an interchangeable body, legs, weapon systems, part upgrades, name, color scheme, and squad role. Different body and leg parts can be purchased and upgraded using development points (acquired in mission and inferno modes). The end result is nearly limitless options for picking the right crew for the job at hand. Oddly enough though, the player is provided with the choice between several different voices for their mech pilot, but the squad just randomly picks between the two generic ones. However, this wasn’t too bothersome, since I quickly turned off the squad voices.

Achieve peak #SquadGoals in Assault Gunners!

It wasn’t the lack of choice that made me turn off squad voices, but lack of translation. Every line of dialogue in this game is in Japanese, and over 80% it is not translated in any way. This is just one of the many ways Assault Gunners is improperly adapted for a North American release or even a Switch release. There are cutscenes throughout the game, but they are all in Japanese without any option for subtitles. Synonyms are used in reference to the same mechanic. For instance, shock, blast, and explosive all refer to the same damage type interchangeably.

A cutscene featuring the game’s main antagonist, Ghost. Even without subtitles, I can imagine she doesn’t have the best intentions.

Translation issues aside, the HD retexture somewhat improves the game’s visual fidelity. However, it still looks like a title belonging to the PS2 rather than the Switch. One feature of the graphical display I found particularly annoying was the mech rotation. Mech rotation is limited based on parts and pilot level, but this is not explained or even graphically illustrated. This mechanic is implemented by slowing camera rotation, but the mech does not rotate with the camera. The result is that the mech instantaneously faces the direction the camera is pointing when shooting. The rotation wasn’t the only thing that was hard to maneuver.

My first challenge in Assault Gunners was getting to the main menu. No joke. In typical fashion, the game asked if I wanted to create a save file when I first loaded it up. I pressed ‘A’ to confirm. The game then warned me I would be unable to save my progress without a save file. Well, that’s no good, so I selected ‘No.’ Then I was taken back to the same prompt. I went through each combination of options, being tossed between these two prompts in some sick game of catch. I then started trying different buttons to try confirming my selection. Against my every instinct, I hit ‘B’ to confirm my selection, and voila! I was finally taken to the main menu.

Some animations appear to be bugged, resulting in the choppy movement above.

As it turns out, Assault Gunners HD Edition is a port of a title originally released for the PS Vita. The game is not only a port of a PS Vita title, but it is also essentially identical to Shade’s mobile game Destroy Gunners SP, released in 2014. Despite being listed as the developers on the eShop page, the game makes no reference to Shade. Rather, it refers to Honey Parade Games. Honey Parade Games, however, makes no reference to the game on their website! This game has certainly gone through hell and come back again, but it is still quite fun and playable for mech lovers!

Summary

Assault Gunners HD Edition is enough to satiate a mech-lovers thirst until something better comes along. While the game has a good implementation of the upgrade system with many customization options, it isn’t enough to convince initiates of the genre of its worth.

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to further support our ad-free reviews, consider checking out our Patreon! If you’re looking for a shooter for the Switch, but not ready to jump into the mech subgenre, check out our report on the newest Paladins update!