Metal Fatigue – Review
When judging a game, it’s very, very important to realise when it was released. With all the indie titles going back to the pixelated aesthetics and players gobbling them up like candy, it’s easy to think that when a game looks outdated it might be for nostalgia purposes. This is the first thing that comes to mind when Metal Fatigue boots up and you’re a younger gamer. Metal Fatigue has been recently added to GOG.com. It’s a game that was released 18 years ago. So judging it by today’s standards isn’t going to make you feel better when you are comparing Metal Fatigue to something that’s been recently released.
Story
The story of Metal Fatigue is rather decent. Humanity has turned its gaze upward to space again, and has come across planets with ruins of the ones that came before. In these ruins, technology could be found that was far more advanced than humanity could comprehend. Earth had 3 ‘Companations’, which are ‘Mil-Agro’, ‘Neuropa’ and ‘Rimtech’. It all starts with three brothers who are all part of ‘Rimtech’. During a battle one brother gets his hands on some tech, and becomes a sellout to another faction, while the other just stays in the employ of ‘Rimtech’, because why fix what isn’t broke? The third, gets lost in the fray, mentally reprogrammed and goes to war against the other factions, which is basically against his own family, so all three brothers are part of another faction, making the narrative quite interesting.
The story is told through text before a mission and you can see what each brother goes through and it’s decently written enough to be a stable backbone for the story campaign.
Graphics
Metal Fatigue aged quite decently, when comparing the game to other games from that year, it comes out quite fine. The ‘Combots’ are rather detailed for being so polygonated. It must have been quite a feat to program it in. The game hasn’t been updated at all, which is great because you have the original experience. But when you up the scale, things get complicated. The in game graphics are decent enough, but when the text gets magnified, the pixilation of it becomes very, very bad, making the text near unreadable, which is sad, because if you lose your way during a game, pressing ESC to see what the mission details are, you might get a headache trying to figure out what it says.
The menus for buildings and their properties are a completely different story.They stay the same small font, which doesn’t translate well when you have a large screen. Then again this game wasn’t made for a 1920 x 1080, so can’t dock their pay for that. Maybe an update for the pixilation of the text and a slightly larger text for building menus, and the game is good to go.
Sound
Voice acting in Metal Fatigue is totally a thing, and it sounds quite crisp. It’s also well done, and for a game that’s so old, sometimes even outdoes games that have been recently released.
The voice narrating the events connecting story missions is also really fun to listen to, she has this tone that’s purely informative, without an ounce of color in it, just giving you the mission briefing and that’s it. She knows her duty and won’t give you more information than you need to know and that even fits the whole ‘military setting’ of Metal Fatigue.
Gameplay
Metal Fatigue is a Real Time Strategy, or RTS for short. Games used to be harder, Metal Fatigue is a great example of it. Where games today tend to hold your hand oftentimes nudging you in the right direction, it used to be where the developers were to drop your ass in the thick of it and you’d have to figure stuff out on your own. Game purists want that era back. Metal Fatigue doesn’t hold your hand too hard by nagging you over what to do, but there’s a soft start, where the missions start off simple enough asking you to do things so you know what buildings do what. So it’s not a tutorial pur sang, but it does help players get into the thick of things as they progress.
There are a lot of things to get into, even for a game that’s nearly two decades old. You’re supposed to build buildings and get a small army on your side like normal in any RTS, but there’s a twist: you can build ‘Combots’ and this is where the game shines. The building of ‘Combots’ is quite fleshed out. As you fight enemies and different factions, you’ll fight other ‘Combots’ and beating them might reward you with different pieces, so you can haul them to your base and then you can use those pieces against the enemies. Before long you’ll have a vast array of giant mechs ready to roll over anyone opposing you.
Before you start any mission, you can pick the difficulty setting, which is great. This way newer players can jump in without drowning, and experienced RTS players can just dive into the game on the highest difficulty level, which will give you a run for your money.
Conclusion
Metal Fatigue has been released on GOG.com and even though it’s an older game, it holds up quite well. RTS meets ‘Robot Wars’. Though some text becomes quite pixelated and near unreadable when you pick the higher resolution options, the rest doesn’t get in the way of playing the game. Other games from that era didn’t age equally well. Fans of the genre will definitely enjoy Metal Fatigue.
Metal Fatigue - Review,
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