Nintendo Dreams – Mech Assault: Phantom War DS (part three)

It’s surprising how many hits the elementals can sustain from me, due to their being so miniature. I haven’t tried stomping on them, mainly as they’re much stronger than humans, they intimidate me. I know they’re killable, though. The first just exploded. I had to unleash a barrage of plasma, but I did it. I have to alternate between shooting the tanks and the elementals; I don’t want anyone sneaking up on me.

That’s it, they’re all dead.

A yellow-green radar on my screen. I decide to follow it. There are tanks in the way, but after the ambush of the elementals, destroying these tanks is easy.

I’ve been given a new suit, God knows why. It’s not like the mechanised robot which I was controlling from my seat in the sky. This is more like an armoured uniform. I’m only slightly larger than the enemy soldiers. I can still kill them by running into them; my armour is not just for defensive purposes, it seems.

I’ve got a few new gadgets with this thing, one in particular – the claw! Apparently I can use it to grab onto things. The problem is pulling the trigger for the claw, (it’s a complex little device,) means taking my attention away from everything else for a second.

I’m told there is a wall here somewhere and I have to get up it. Surely that’s what the jump jets are for. But I realise as I find the wall, a blurry grey monolith, with holes and fixtures, definitely man-made. And begin to ascend, that my jet fuel runs out before I reach the top. Use the claw!

By the time I refuel I’ve fallen. So this time, as I’m scaling the wall, I latch on and wait to refuel. I realise this is all far too easy. It’s not a simple process, but as a player I’m not challenged. There are no obstructions deterring me from getting to the top. No sequence of falling bricks, from an avalanche maybe, or snipers to dodge – like something out of Rambo.

More tanks here. Not a problem. A number of well-placed walls provide me with cover. And by now I’m pretty confident about destroying tanks. I’m still getting used to swiveling the Mech’s head and strafing at the same time. Honestly, I can’t do this at all. So I hide, swivel, then line up my cross-hair and shoot like mad. But while I’m shooting, I run around in case they shoot back. In a few minutes the tanks are burned.

Nobody is in my ear. The radar is blank. The environment before me looks the same as behind me. I think I’m lost. I got turned around after stealthily destroying the last two tanks. I think I’ll go this way. I reach a slate grey platform and jump off it. It’s not until I find another one and jump down from there as well, that I realise these are the walls which I climbed using the claw!

No wonder there are no enemies, I’ve gone back the way I came. If this was a game I was playing from the outside, I would switch it off out of frustration.