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Damascus Gear: Tokyo War Begins [PSV]

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    Damascus Gear: Tokyo War Begins [PSV]

    A game about giant robots from Arc System Works, which more or less can be described as an isometric Armored Core, though I don't think Damascus Gear will come close to From Softwares's long-standing series in terms of complexity and depth, but this is not to tell that the game is shallow or badly done.
    Damascus Gear revolves a series of missions divided into different ranks, based on their difficulty; once all missions in one rank have been completed, an exam mission will pop up to continue in your slaughtering of enemy robots.
    Robots in Damascus Gear can be customised in head, body, arms, legs, shoulder pads, and left, rght and back hardpoints for weapons.
    All weapons are ammo-free but each consumes a certain amount of energy from their own reserves and these reserves are recharged by the mecha; if there isn't enough energy a weapon cannot fire.
    Weapons carried in arms are the usual selection of machine guns, rifles, blades and piledrivers, with backpack weapons ranging from support lasers to missile launchers.
    Controls are easy: square, triangle, and circle are used for the three hardpoints; R makes the robot run, X is for short dashes, L for using the repair kits; movement is through the left analog stick.

    Missions so far revolved around killing all enemies on the map, sometimes with the help of NPCs, which are pretty dumb: there's no friendly fire but isn't not uncommon for NPCs with melee-oriented mechas to dash toward the enemy with you between them...and moving you toward danger in the process. Luckily enemies are as mindless as the allies, and after they pop up on the map, it's easy to lure them in a tight formation and devastate them with support weapons.
    All weapon categories have their distinct personality, though what changes within one category are how weapons look and their stats.

    #2
    And the robot slaughtering continues...with added boredom.

    Climbed in an hour or so from rank D to what looks like the last missions of rank C, and everything has been so uneventful that's actually surprising. Sometimes the mission will feature larger-than-normal robots or robots with new weapons, but the fact that standard enemies and bosses are next to braindead, doesn't help. Standard enemies are happy to stand still while being shot, charge right in front of support weapons, or retreat while being shot at. Every mecha has one or two attack patterns, and more powerful attacks have an incredibly long charging time that in the end, you get hit because you don't care anymore. Larger enemies often use the wrong attack, like using a long-range artillery cannon with a huge minimum range while you are hacking at them at close range. Not even large groups of smaller enemies are a problem beucase you can usually shoot them down before they can attack.

    Missions can be divided into three categories: race through various waypoints, search for some items, and destroy X enemies. So far missions have been set on a grand total of three maps, with the city being used and abused beyond belief. Sometimes Damascus Gear tries to spice things up by linking items to robots that run away from you, for example, but these attempts are incredibly lazy: said robots run away from you, but before running away, they have to run toward you, and hello to my mega beam of death, more than capable of taking out multiple small and medium enemies with one shot.

    Weapons have varied characteristics, but there's no real incentive to try them out, nor the game really allows to customise robots as full long or close range attackers, as the former are good against small enemies, and the former against bosses and large enemies. Going full long- or close- range means to getting damaged for no reason, so once you've found weapons you like, it's more than natural to stick with them until more powerful ones are available.

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      #3
      I decided to go against the game: I've tried to buy parts from the shop and experiment with weapon loadouts.
      Result: overdrive backpack, the solution to bosses with too much health. Higher damage, higher defense, higher movement speed when active. Downsides: long recharge time, but one use is enough to bring a boss down to 50% health (by just standing there and attacking). I've lost to the ability to mow down small enemies, but at least boss encounters take less time (and are therefore less boring).
      I've also tried the chainsaw, a neat idea that can stun enemies, but when against enemies equipped with chainsaws, fights would just be two mechs standing there sawing each other (...), so back to the tried-and-true rifle/sword combo.

      And what's better than braindead AI enemies and NPCs? Braindead NPCs you have to defend. Ugh, defense missions. So far only two in the whole game, and in both missions I've failed because the "attacking" NPCs boxed in the objective and the boss happily targeted them (from afar) and everyone stood still, merrily getting shot at. I think Damascus Gear is the first game where I had to move something I have to defend more than attacking the offenders.

      Also: missions where you have to collect items that are randomly assigned to enemy robots, that come in waves. As the ranking for these missions is time, how exactly I'm supposed to get the best rank if a wave might or might not have the items I'm looking for? And if there's a huge time window between waves?

      Damascus Gear has some good ideas, but are buried below an incredibly sloppy execution.

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        #4
        Quick note: ArcSys are bringing the game over to the US and Europe.

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