Playing Zoids Assault is like fooling around with a girl who needs to use a lot of acne scars cream; you may get somewhere, but you won’t feel good about doing it. What this Atlus-published turn-based strategy RPG with a military flavor wants more than anything is to be the next Front Mission (SquareEnix’s storied military strat-RPG). Instead, it plays more like a less action-oriented version of some Mobile Suit Gundam game, only worse.
Now, I usually enjoy a good, solid Tactics-style RPG as much as anyone you could name; but that’s not what Zoids Assault is. It’s more of a turn-based military strategy game with RPG aspirations that never really pan out. The graphics, while attempting to be next-gen, simply don’t impress, especially since the horrid game camera frequently places your point of view to one of the least-complementary angles possible for each action following a turn choice.
The battle system is complex and never sufficiently explained; the game simply tosses you into the middle of an extremely challenging battle against aggressive AI foes who will probably finish you off a couple times before you find your way around and take out the enemy. Of course, only dedicated fans will possess that much patience for a game that has no tutorial mode, poor documentation and an imposing learning curve.
I mean, really, who wants to invest three or four hours in your first two or three battles, only to win once and never really come away from the experience knowing much about why you lost. Making matters worse is that the game offers no way to revive fallen units once they’ve been dispatched by enemy forces, which even in the first battle are frequently more powerful than yours.
It’s nice to see Xbox 360 getting some Atlus-love and building a respectable RPG library, but this sort of me-too-ware is a disappointment, rather than a must-have for any discerning RPG lover. It’s a bit too early in the new generation of hardware for garbageware to be tolerable, and unfortunately, that’s the category Zoids Assault falls into; if you can only choose one Atlus RPG on 360 this summer, skip this one and be sure to grab the impressive Spectral Force 3 instead.
Tags: acne scars cream, Atlus, Xbox 360, Zoids Assault
