”Augh! What were they THINKING when they made this?!”



When comments like the above are processed by my vast gaming intellect repeatedly while I am attempting to enjoy a new title, there is obviously something wrong with my gaming experience – something not at all related to an uncomfortable chair, a dying monitor, or a little five-year-old child banging on one’s leg with a used NES controller. No, it’s an unavoidable, unchangeable issue that stems from the game’s physical design, a taint if you will, that consistently clouds one’s enjoyment of the title and just makes one’s encounter with it a somewhat miserable one.

Right, enough dramatic crap, I’ll get on with the point: Gungriffon: Allied Strike is not a good Xbox game. It’s not a terrible Xbox game either, but this title certainly isn’t anything I would classify as “exemplary”, and it irritates me how easily Tecmo could have made it something much, much better. Gungriffon: Allied Strike takes place in an explosive, war-ridden future, where the United Nations is at odds with just about every major nation, and several factions are preparing to break into all-out war. Finally, the U.N. decides it can’t sit by and let the world go to hell anymore, and deploys an army called the “PKF”. It is this army that the player is a member of, so it’s time to saddle up into your favorite giant robot and head out to go kick some ass.

Yeah, that’s about it plot-wise – the game doesn’t exactly feature any kind of compelling intro movie or detailed story information, so thumbing through the manual was the best I could do to figure out who exactly I was fighting for, and why. I’m going to admit that this is the first Gungriffon title I’ve played to date, although I understand that it’s based on a long-running and somewhat popular series, so I was certainly willing to give it every chance. Instead, what I found was something new to complain about at every turn. Initially, the concept seems sound: Start up the campaign, review the briefing for the current mission, pick from a selection of “AWGS” (“Armored Walking Gun System”) mechs, customize with an incredibly limited selection of weapons, and run into the field to go blow stuff up. While the Steel Battalion controller occupying a good chunk of real estate on my desk is as good a sign as any on my enjoyment of hardcore simulation-styled mech games, I still don’t have any objection to playing titles that lean towards the arcade side of things, provided they don’t suck.

Here’s my problem with Gungriffon. Upon my initial foray into the game’s missions, I actually had a pretty good impression. The cockpit graphics were very neat and attractive, the music felt very appealing, and the game had the typical lean on tactical techno-babble that most mecha titles are prone to focusing on. But the more I played, the more I began to take an immense disliking to the way the game handled. While Mech Assault is another game that revolved around simplistic, fast-paced maneuvering and twitch-based combat, the movement in it felt very fluid and at least somewhat believable. This is not the case at all for Gungriffon, as the handling of my AWGS felt clumsy, awkward, and, once I noticed the incredibly poor animations from the game’s third person mode, totally and completely unrealistic. Mechs jump almost instantly between moving forwards and backwards or trying to strafe left and right, strangely begin moving at about one quarter of their speed when attempting to maneuver diagonally, and are just ultimately a representation of how one would expect a buffed-up marine from one’s favorite generic first person shooter to move and react, rather than a giant robot. I’m dead serious about how poorly the player AWGS is animated from the third person viewpoint though – after first switching into that view and watching myself move around, I was so jarred that I immediately switched back to first person mode and resolved never to return to the external camera view again, lest I be met with an overwhelming urge to chuck the game before I had a chance to play it properly.

Of course, “movement feels completely and totally wrong” isn’t really a sufficient complaint to warrant passing over the game in favor of something better, so I’ll elaborate further on why I feel Gungriffon is not a very good release. First, a little more info on some of the title’s core gameplay elements. The average mission in Gungriffon consists of dropping into the field with yourself and a single team mate (as well as the occasional squad of AI-controlled friendlies), who work together to try and accomplish whatever objective is set forth. Offering further assistance to the player is the “DLS”, or “Data Link System”, which basically enables the player to have radar support and helps in identifying distant enemies on the HUD. Combat in the game basically involves running up to an enemy target and shooting it to pieces with any number of select weapons, but it takes some skill and practice to determine which weapon is best to use in a given situation and how to use it effectively – Cannon weapons seem to be the all-around most effective tools, while unguided rocket pods deliver a huge punch, yet also have very limited ammo. Guided missiles can be very useful from long range, but also have limited ammunition, while the basic machinegun each AWGS comes with can fire indefinitely, but the pilot has to be careful about not overheating his weapon. In essence, all weapons in the game have very limited ammo (aside from the aforementioned machinegun), enforcing a heavy reliance on supply choppers, which are deployed into the field at pre-scripted intervals, hang around for a limited amount of time to resupply and repair the player if he wanders underneath, and then take off before being shot down.

Here’s where the implementation starts to fall apart. First, while the enemy AI seemed to be at least partially decent, my little squad mate’s brain wasn’t quite up to par. This little fact worked together with the somewhat clumsy way of ordering my guy around to ensure that my buddy almost never survived to the end of the mission unless I purposely left him behind. See, pushing the black button on the controller issues a generic “Cover Me” order, which works well enough for the most part, but pushing the white button is supposed to be a kind of context-sensitive function for either telling your team mate to move to a plot of terrain, attack a specific enemy, or just follow you. The problem is that I never seemed to be able to get my buddy to do what I wanted him to. No matter how many times I waved my crosshairs over an enemy and hit the white button, my team mate never seemed to respond properly to my order and kept going off to do his own thing. Telling my friend to move somewhere (like, say, the side of an enemy formation for a flanking move) also never quite worked right, because he kept stopping to engage the enemy along the way, and promptly did little more than sit there and get shot to pieces in the process. Conversely, enemy units seemed to know how to fling projectiles my way with pinpoint precision (and also seem to have unlimited ammo, as evidenced by the amount I got chewed up from long range guided missile fire) and also strafed around me in a manner that made them surprisingly difficult foes, so at least the AI isn’t completely hopeless.

Secondly, locational damage is supposed to be one of the game’s more attractive points, thanks to the ability for four critical parts of your AWGS to be damaged or even destroyed – the head, the “armor”, the body, or the legs – but a lackluster implementation of this system left me quite disappointed. Each component of the player’s AWGS seems to be connected to only one real major system, and affects only that system when destroyed, nothing else. So every time I lost my AWGS’ legs, I also lost the ability to execute the “Rollerdash” function (which basically allows the mech to skate across the landscape at high speed), but that was it – my overall maneuverability wasn’t affected at all, and the external appearance of my AWGS also did not change in the slightest to reflect the damage I had taken. What the hell? There’s also a disturbing lack of damage feedback in the game’s cockpit mode, and I sometimes had a hard time telling I had taken critical damage until I actually glanced at my damage gauge, something which I consider incredibly poor, immersion-breaking design – when my mech is hit by a huge missile, at least shake the cockpit a little!

There are still other things that hurt my experience as well. The aforementioned reliance on supply choppers is a nice touch, but the briefing never provided me any information on when exactly the supply chopper was going to arrive (the first mission briefing even said I should study the arrival times and be prepared, or some such), leaving me to do nothing but randomly guess when I could expect it the first time I played through a mission. Enemy units also show up on occasion to attack the chopper and shoot it down, but I never received any kind of message, warning, or radar paint of who was attacking the chopper and when, which proved to be a sizable inconvenience on more than one occasion. But the most significant problem I encountered with the game was the difficulty. I count myself as a skilled and dedicated gamer, but the game’s difficulty curve kept bouncing erratically from one mission to the next, and the amount that I got stuck early on proved to be quite irritating. One mission would be such an incredible breeze that I’d wonder how I was able to beat it so fast, and then the next one would force me out of the game in frustration until I recovered enough to attempt the mission again. Thanks to a rather vague, poorly-worded manual and an even worse in-game tutorial (that only encompasses the first mission in the middle of the player being shot at, consists of large blocky text taking up a good chunk of the screen rather than a pleasing voice-over, and even suffers from spelling errors), I was left somewhat on my own to try and understand all of these gameplay elements being suddenly thrown in my face and didn’t feel very immersed in the action at all.

Gungriffon would be a total and complete trainwreck were it not for the multiplayer support, which actually manages to redeem it, if only somewhat. First, as almost a middle-finger-salute to Halo 2, Gungriffon has online co-op play – in fact, a system link or Xbox Live connection is the only way the game can be played in multiplayer, as there is no splitscreen support. Thanks to the ability to tackle any mission in the game with a buddy using a variety of different AWGS types, I actually found myself overlooking the game’s flaws and having physical fun for a change, simply because charging through a ravine with a friend to go beat up on a squad of AI-controlled enemies is such an incredible amount of fun, and it just goes to show that even a shoddy game such as this can be revived through the addition of co-op play – if this was a last, desperate gamble by the developers to make Gungriffon actually worth playing, then it sure as hell helped. The game also offers a generic deathmatch / team deathmatch setting, where up to 8 players can compete with each other on a variety of maps in the fine art of… blowing each other up. Initially the novelty of seeing a whole bunch of AWGS pilots duking it out on large-scale levels makes multiplayer seem pretty enticing, especially with the differences between some AWGS types and the available weapons, but it wasn’t long before I started to feel the gaping hole left by a lack of any objective-based modes, like Capture the Flag. The game’s network code is at least fairly solid, although the multiplayer interface itself seems very poorly done, and I also took an immense disliking to the way the friends list was handled – there’s even an irritating bug that shipped with the game that kept causing my friends list cursor to jump back to the top of the list, something I learned is a common problem after I conversed with a few other people. Great job, Tecmo.

Gungriffon’s graphics engine is something of a hit-or-miss affair, and sadly, it mostly misses. While the terrain, weather effects, and explosions all look rather nice, everything else felt like a mess of low-detail textures and special effects or hack-job animations. I’ve already ranted about how terrible the movement on the mechs in the game looks in action, but it really hurt my immersion (what little of it I had left) to see my own AWGS in motion. The weapon effects really don’t look all that impressive, and I consider the lack of any noticeable damage effects as a result of a destroyed system on an AWGS to be unacceptable. I’m also not really one to often complain about how the units in a mech game look (just so long as I get to stomp around and blow stuff up, I’m usually happy), but I personally consider the AWGS designs in Gungriffon to be incredibly unappealing, and the terrible animations only compounded my feelings on the matter. The designs also made it somewhat hard to tell certain AWGS designs apart from one another without the aid of my targeting system, so it’s not like this is a mere personal gripe. On the plus side, at least the framerates remained high.