Override: Mech City Brawl

Override: Mech City Brawl is an indie mech arena brawler that gets a lot of things right. The single player is often a little on the easy side, but the great character designs and weighty combat help to make up for it, with local multiplayer proving to be a hell of a lot of fun. It’s perfect for fans of giant mechs and kaiju brawling, and easily one of the best additions to the genre in a while.

Everybody loves giant robots. Whether it be Transformers, Gundam, Voltron, Jaegers, few things can bring people together like monolithic titans kicking the crap out of each other and giant monsters. Despite that, it’s a tragically underrepresented genre. They are still few and far between despite popular titles such as Titanfall or Armored Core. There are even fewer that channel the simple childish joy of watching brightly colored mechs going at it, preferring a more militaristic approach...

Override: Mech City Brawl is not likely to become an esports fixture, but it doesn’t seek to and it certainly knows its audience. It’s acutely aware of its own silliness, even giving you the option to unlock (no, there are no microtransactions here) different colours and ridiculous accessories for your foe. Want to fight as a pink pirate hat-wearing Gundam knock-off? Override has you covered. Override: Mech City Brawl may not quite nail the grand sense of scale, and I would certainly have loved to see some more organic monsters added to the roster, but it’s an entertaining little fighter to di...

Override: Mech City Brawl had a lot of potential, but ultimately I like the concept a lot more than the execution. The fighting engine is adequate, but I felt like it should be a lot more fun blowing up a city in a million-ton robot suit. It kinda seems like this one was sent out to die, and that’s a damn shame.

Back in 2013, Pacific Rim was released and I loved it. During the same year, a Pacific Rim game was released and, frankly, it was terrible. Why do I mention this? I get the impression that Override: Mech City Brawl is the sort of game that Guillermo Del Toro would have approved of when it comes to Pacific Rim. It's cheesy, fun and a genuinely good spectacle.

When I was in school, and I won’t say what kind of school, there was a game I loved to play on the GameCube called Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee. I had never played anything like it at the time. In retrospect, it was sort of like Power Stone, but if everyone was a sluggish, giant monster with weird limbs and appendages instead of speedy, anime characters. But at the time, it was a strange fighting game that didn’t follow any of the rules, and I loved it for that. Several years later, along comes Override: Mech City Brawl, a game that looks exactly like the Godzilla brawler of years past...

While Override: Mech City Brawl is a promising enough idea, sadly the execution leaves a lot to be desired.