Mecha Break Review: A Delicious Filet Mignon, Slathered In Ketchup

I’ve been annoying everyone around me this week because I can’t stop talking about mechs. No one can get a word in because I’m filling the air with extremely detailed descriptions of all my favorite fighting rob▨ots, and spoiler alert, they’re all my favorites.

There’s one called Falcon that can transform into a fighter jet and fly around harassing everyone with its missile ooh ooh and another one called Welkin that has a giant ax and can trap people in a laser box filled with razor blades, and oh, did I tell you about Panther? I did? Well, anyway, Panther has a big lance you can charge up and drive into other people’s backs like a drill. I♚ know you know, but how coo🍬l is that?

Mecha Break Hands-On: Don't Sleep On The Next Great Hero Shooter

Mecha Break might be this year's brea🍒kout shoote🃏r.

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has turned me back into an eight-year-old who c꧙an’t stop talking his mom’s ear off about all of his favorite , which, if you ask me, is the mark of a good mech game. Mechs are first and foremost supposed to be cool. You should want to pick them up and smash them into each other like your childhood action figures. D♌espite some glaring flaws, Mecha Break taps into my love and nostalgia for giant robots more than any mech game out there.

Watch Me Soar

Mecha Break is a mech game, but it isn’t really a Mech game. That sounds ridiculous, but there are certain conventions of t꧙he genre fans expect that you won’t find in Mecha Break. Mech games are all about customization, but you won’t find much to customize here. You can give each unit🐈 a paint job (and you can get pretty fancy with it) and you can dress up your pilot (for a hefty fee), but, in the main 6v6 game mode at least, you can’t change your weapons, swap out your boosters, or tweak your engine. Each striker (Mecha Break’s word for mechs) comes stock, straight from the factory, ready for battle.

As a consequence, Mecha🐎 Break’s gameplay is extraordinarily streamlined for a mech game. It has a kind of pick-and-up-play quality that you don’t find in this genre, but you do find in hero shooters like Overwatch and Marvel Rivals. It has a high skill ceiling, and every mech requires practice to pilot effectively, but it might not be a game that appeals to the typical mech fan.

That suits me just fine though, and I appreciate being able to jump straight into the action and experie✅nce thrilling battles without a lot of grinding and fine-tuning. Mecha Break has three game modes that all offer a different version of the same explosive gameplay: a 3v3 death match, a 6v6 with typical hero shooter modes (capture point, payload, etc), and Mashmak, a PvPvE extraction mode that lets you upgrade your mech with the materials you recover.

I’ve spent most of my time in the 6v6 mode, otherwise known as Operation Verge. It offers the most direct mech-on-mech action in a wide variety of destructible battlefields, and even though there are only a handful of maps, dodging missiles and dashing around never ꦏgets old. The pace of combat is exhilarating,😼 and fighting over miles of mountain ranges and floating cities gives each match an incredible sense of scale and speed.

A character in Mecha Break staring down a boss.

There’s a nice variety between the classes of strikers. Attackers, defenders, brawlers, supports, and snipers come in a variety of sizes from light to ultra-heavy, giving them complet꧋ely different playstyles and utility in battle. Team composition is critical, as having a variety of classes will help ensure you can defend each other from your opponents while exploiting the enemy team's weaknesses.

You get a totally different experience based on the striker you choose. A light attacker like Falcon can soar across the battlefield to claim objectives, interrupt enemies, and turn the tide of a fight🦩. Meanwhile, an ultra-heavy defensive striker like Tricera can barely lift itse💧lf off the ground, but is a practically unkillable tank that can shred smaller strikers to pieces with its Gatling guns. It feels like there’s more playstyle variety in Mecha Break than any other hero shooter, and a lot of opportunity for interesting team synergy.

But I’m not thinking about any of that stuff when I’m in the cock🤪pit. I’m operating purely on instinct a🐻s I dodge lasers and missile barrages and hack and slash my way through the reinforced steel hide of an enemy support. You have to be in perfect sync with your striker when using your energy shield to execute perfect parries or unleashing a swarm of micro-missiles at the perfect time while you strafe past an unaware opponent. Mecha Break’s moment-to-moment action can’t be beat, which I sometimes have to remind myself of when I start to get frustrated about some of its less satisfying features.

More Like Mecha Break The Bank

Player at the Logistics Store in Mecha Break showing all the designs and other items on right.

There’s some pretty egregious monetization in Mecha Break. It’s largely tied to cosmetic customization, but as I said before, customization is one of the mai🌱n appeals of a mech game, so it feels especially bad when you can’t really do that without first turning over your credit 🎐card.

Stuff isn’t cheap either. The first thing you’ll see when you start the game is an ad for a new pilot and a sweet paint job for Falcon: USD price $57.99. You can earn currency by playing, but the amount you earn is so low♑ (and capped each week) that it almost feels required that you buy the battle pass, which multiplies the amount of currency you earn after each match. The game even keeps track of all the currency you could have earned until you buy the battle pass, just to turn the pressure up and make it seem like a better value.

You can ignore the cosmetic stuff, but there are also three mechs that need to be unlocked with that currency. Because of the weekly cap, you’ll have to grind the m🐠aximum amount every week for five weeks just to buy one. 🔜Oh, and you lose that currency at the end of each season too, so you really have to be on top of it if you want to unlock three of the coolest strikers in the game (one of them has dual energy swords).

Then there’s the boobs. I’ve already written about the boobs, so I don’t want to harp on t🥂he boobs, but man, Mecha Break is really in your face with the boobs, literally. I get fan service, but Mecha Break is good enough to stand on its own without having to cheapen its appeal with all the jiggle physics. It’s just kind of trashy, and I imagine it probably turns off more peopl꧑e from the game than it attracts.

None of this stuff ruins Mecha Break’s exceptional gameplay, but it does sour it. Mecha Break is kind of like a beautiful 8oz filet mignon from the fanciest restaurant in town, with a thick layer of Heinz ketchup splattered on top. Sure, you can scrape off the ketchup and stiꦿll enjoy the steak, but it would be a lot better if the ketchup just wasn’t there at all.