Mechs & Mercs: Black Talons Review

It has been many moons since I played a strategy game. Me and my brothers would all load up our laptops, grab something to drink (what started as hot chocolate became straight whiskey over time) and our strategy game of choice was Civilisation IV. Many a sleepless weekend was blown on that game screwing each other over in whatever fashion would help us win best.

I did hold some love for games on the other end in the RTS spectrum such as Command and Conquer and Dawn of War; and for Mechs & Mercs: Black Talons this is where your love of strategy must lie. The game is a modern stab of homage to strategy games of old. And if you pine for your copy of Dawn of War, you can totally ignore the fact Dawn of War 2 is on Steam and launch right into this baby.

‘Hold on,’ I hear you cry. ‘This is just gonna be another game which tries to slam many concepts together and fail miserably!’ And, well, you’re half right. You can easily see common strategy concepts sticking through. But this game isn’t some Frankenstein of all the good concepts which drains the fun and makes them suck; though some seem underused or added lazily.

So you are the head of the Black Talon Company. A menacing-yet-cool named mercenary company roaming space. The nearby peaceful planet of Genai is being invaded by the bigger and meaner Tzanar Union for their resources and the planet offers a sizeable reward for assisting in its defence. So you turn your ship, the Paladin, around and head down to the planet for some of that sizeable reward. Dramatic enough for you?

So after the one and only offer of context, off you go into your arena. You control a variety of ground units of 4 to six members differing in attack, speed and skills. You also get, as the title promises, mechs, which are the customisable across several classes to spice things up. Don’t expect some amazing variation here as the game mechanics tend to just make the heavy units overpowered and you’ll quickly find yourself highlighting all your units and just defeating enemies by sheer volume.

There are no complex orders within this game and you can’t line up some epic Rainbow Six tactical battle. Tell them to walk here. Tell them to shoot this. Tell them to capture this point. That is the crux of your gameplay. Most of your time will be spent moving from cover to cover tanking endless enemies and slowly pushing through the objectives to capture. There is a stripped down feeling to any of the mechanics and even then they’re explained rather poorly. There’s no minimap prompts, there’s no technical orders. You will spend most of the time launching heavy units at unflankable positions and praying the unit can take the brunt to get in range of the enemy the attack.

Once you have tortured yourself through this gameplay, you gain access to the headquarters layer. This is the better of the two mechanics. Here you recruit, outfit units, choose missions and research and improve your facilities. However, rather than being a smooth pretty mechanic reminiscent of XCOM you get a goofed and unrefined interface with no information and unnecessary clicks. This mechanic does not make you feel like a mercenary leader; it makes you feel like a secretary at a back-alley loan shark piggybacking off the neighbour’s WIFI.

The visual appeal is lacking also. You and your enemy look the same. The dead disappear too quickly for you to appreciate the totality of all the lemming enemies. Environments look, while colourful and high resolution, a bit sterile. There’s nothing special about how this game looks. Everything sits in this paradox of not being outright horrendous, but at the same time not good.

This game is lacklustre. Clumsy, subpar, and clunky. It feels, like many other strategy games of recent, that they simply tried to take the best mechanics of several games and slam them together in the hope of a bestseller. There’s no polish, no zing to make this game interesting. It hints at extra mechanics later in the game but leaves you disheartened as the reality is a bleak continuum. Maps are stacked against you, the AI is poor and the gameplay is simple suicide missions.

Overall this is such a disappointing experience. Another game that is going to pollute my steam library with a few hours gameplay time while I binge more Civ 5 and XCOM. There isn’t any redeeming feature hidden away within the game. It’s a poor game.

Sun Tzu wrote that a clever fighter is not just someone who wins, but ‘excels at winning with ease.’ Well this game may push that clever fighter to throwing his PC out of a window in digital seppuku. This game gets a 0.5 rating. I’ll file it with Escape Dead Island as not worth stealing in a riot. Everyone just go back to XCOM and Starcraft. There’s nothing special here.

Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.