Mech Arena is a competitive multiplayer mobile mech shooter with team-based gameplay, intense battles, and a lot of ways to show off your skills.
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it's just simply the greatest game of all time.
i'm not surprised at all that plarium games was able to make yet another banger. the characters are amazing, the story is compelling, and the mechs are arenaing.
during my time playing the game i think i reinvented the entire meta game. i'm sure the community will remember me as the greatest arena mecher of all time.
i'm not surprised at all that plarium games was able to make yet another banger. the characters are amazing, the story is compelling, and the mechs are arenaing.
during my time playing the game i think i reinvented the entire meta game. i'm sure the community will remember me as the greatest arena mecher of all time.
Depression is often characterized with angst and anhedonia. I’ve heard it described as “a disease that takes away your ability to enjoy sunsets.” It’s parasitic, turning you into a walking vessel. It makes you slow, empty, unhappy, unable to do anything, to want to do anything, to find a reason to do anything. What’s talked about less is how stupid it makes you. Depression also turns your brain into mush. You struggle to muster focus and energy and end up doing awfully embarrassing things. You fall back on old habits, you develop ugly new ones. You sleep poorly and smell worse. There is a sexy and poetic version of depression, sure, but to act as if it is not also composed of skipped showers and junk food wrappers is disingenuous. Depression is just as often languidly writhing in the moonlight like a Caravaggio painting as it is watching a two hour YouTube video in your underwear as the sun rises.
It perhaps indicates the relative severity of my current darling depressive episode that I was drawn to Mech Arena: Robot Showdown. I don’t like playing games on my phone, I am not competitive, and the context I first heard of this game was during the sycophantic extravaganza that is The Game Awards. But hey. Guess what? It’s got stompy robots. And I love stompy robots. And video games, with their natural talent of alchemizing long stretches of time into a forgotten blink, are a natural fit for a case of melancholy. So I submitted to my most degenerate impulses and hit download.
It’s nothing too shocking. It’s an arena of mechs. Exactly what it says on the tin. You spawn into a level, and fight other players on teams, either with control points or a team deathmatch. This is bog standard stuff, and it’s immediately clear to me that this game is very interested in being like Overwatch. It’s everywhere, from its end-of-match medal system, to the architecture, to the design of its mechs, to the minutiae of its UI elements. Presumably, there was a design document somewhere that said “EVERYONE IS D.VA” that somehow got turned into a game.
There’s maybe a dozen different mechs available at this point, all with different special abilities and stats. There’s also a bunch of different weapons which have some decent variance. The early ones are the most boring: a mech with a sprint, a mech with a jump, a mech with a shield. You know, really exciting mechanical hooks. The mechs have two weapon slots each, which are customizable. Almost all the weapons also have an absurdly long reload period (like, usually over 5 seconds) so combat has this lovely tendency to result in two opposing players circling each other unable to do anything. I presume this could be to encourage teamwork, but uh… it’s a mobile game. Not gonna happen, hoss. (While I’m nitpicking, why can’t I listen to podcasts or music when I’m playing this damn game? That’s the whole point!) Mechs also serve as this kind of lives system; you can only use a given mech once per match/round.
The more interesting mechs take a while to unlock, so the early game is kind of dull until you get them. All you can really do is clomp around and shoot a few rounds off. Theres a pretty generous aim assist, which I guess makes sense, but it feels kinda mindless. Apparently, the game is going to be adding pilots in the near future, which maybe can give some much needed personality to the game. Once you manage to get one of the cool robots, the wackier elements make the game significantly more fun. For example, there’s this mech called Killshot that has a melee charge that does an ungodly amount of damage on a dangerously short cooldown. So I equipped a laser weapon so I can chip enemies down from a distance and then close the distance and kill them with the dash. I cackle pretty much every time I do it. It’s very silly, but silly is a good thing sometimes. I also developed a long-range sniper build paired with homing missiles that erased health bars near-instantly. I have no idea if this is balanced or the rate at which these strategies diminish in efficacy, but I would be lying if I didn’t squeeze every drop of fun I could from it and licked it up like a cat on a dish of warm milk. Because it’s just mindless stompy mech fights. It’s adequate, and at its best, it’s dumb fun. That’s what I wanted, and that’s what I got.
Stop. Hold on. You probably thought (and reasonably so) that I was just describing the game that is Mech Arena: Robot Showdown to you. But you’d be sorely mistaken. Because it’s not a game about big stompy robots duking it out and shooting big guns. Mech Arena is a game about making numbers go up by any means necessary.
Stop me if this sounds familiar. Mechs and weapons have star rankings and levels. Lower ranked mechs not only have less health, but less energy, too, and thus can’t equip stronger weapons. Without that firepower, you’ll quickly find that you can’t do a damn thing in a firefight. This isn’t a game of twitch skill where you can perfectly evade and outplay an overpowered enemy. You’re a big lumbering machine, and even the spryest mechs won’t outrun bullets. There’s skill involved, sure. But the numbers game can outpace that quickly.
How do you increase their power? Well, Mech Arena’s version of Overwatch loot crates, rather than being cosmetic focused, are mostly a way to increase your power. (Even watching these boxes open reminds me of Overwatch.) There are paint-jobs and skins in there, sure, but you’re mostly getting blueprints (which are used to power up specific mechs/weapons) and other currencies (which also help you level up). You can also, of course, cough up some money and just get some of that stuff straight away, or buy a bunch of loot boxes.
You recognize it, don’t you? The creeping sensation? I’ll go on. There are like five or more separate currencies in this game that all do different things. Everytime you open the game, you’re bombarded with pop-ups that tell you about a new deal in the store you can snag. Hell, you’ll get bombarded with those offers in between matches, too, forcing you to tap the X button repeatedly before you can get back to playing the damn game. At some point, I discovered that the company that made this game, Plarium Games, are the same folks behind Raid: Shadow Legends, a gacha RPG that has quite literally become a meme because of its horrible monetization and incessant sponsorships. (If you’ve never heard of this game, you’re incredibly lucky and I envy you.) Around this time, it starts coming into focus. This is a storefront with a game attached to it, not the other way around.
Gacha games make my skin crawl. There’s something Machiavellian about them. The first gacha I ever played was Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare, and I hated what it did to my brain. I never spent money and didn’t get obsessive, but even still, I hated feeling how the game sunk its fingers into my life, occupied my thoughts about time. I put a bit of time into World Flipper but lost interest quickly. I have friends who mark out hard for Granblue or Fate, and while I could give them a chance, I have a sneaking suspicion that I would hate those games, too. (I don’t even really like normal VNs…) I have yet to play Genshin Impact and while I suspect I might enjoy it, the very foundation of what gacha games are, which is glorified and overly complex gambling, skeeves me out. While Mech Arena might not technically be a gacha game, the hints of gacha design are everywhere.
Still, in my depressive stupor, I fixated on a simple goal: unlock Arachnos. There was an event in the game with daily missions, essentially functioning as another free Battle Pass. (Oh, by the way, did I mention this game has a Battle Pass, too?) There always seems to be one or two of these events thrown at the player; it’s a great way of driving attachment and daily play, after all. The final prize at the end of this specific event is Arachnos, a big spider mech (four legs instead of eight, though) whose special ability makes a turret. And I’d be lying if I don’t love a spidery mech. So I worked to acquire Arachnos, in all her mystique.
But of course, that’s not how this story ends. I will not be seeing Arachnos. See, as I plucked away at these daily quests, I started to notice that there were routinely ones that instructed me to share a referral link. Now, I may have stooped low enough to put time into this damn game, but come on. Is this a pyramid scheme? I would do anything for mechs, but I won’t do that. There are seven days in the event, and five on each day. I don’t need to complete every single mission, just 30 of them. I’ve done the math. But they keep showing up. I know if 6 of these show up, I can’t get Arachnos. It’s day 6, and I see the fifth referral mission, and I know if I see another one tomorrow, my time has been wasted. And then I see the next mission. “Make an in-game purchase.” Fuck. The deal is done. Absolutely not. I’m not getting this fucking mech. The terms are clear. Mech Arena refuses to be contained to an app. It says, “What magic circle?” The game has to expand into your pockets or into your friends list. The sunk cost burrowing in my brain, I feel myself tempted to just put down a dollar or beg a close friend just to download the game for a minute. But I close the game. And I don’t open it again.
It’s at this point that I ask myself: are we gaming, fellas? Is this really what video games are? Am I to accept that what I spend an inordinate amount of time doing is so easily reduced to a frenzied parody of capitalism, embroiled so deeply in it already? That they are so easily full of cruelty and emptiness? Is this really gaming?
And the answer, of course, is absolutely.
You know, in my everlasting snootiness, it’s so tempting to give into pretension. I know I’m not alone. But it’s crucial to never forget how fickle one’s own proclivities are. Fascinations and fixations make bedfellows, leading to grotesque but irresistible obsessions. The natural extent of that, in a way, is a game like Mech Arena, an infinite series of asinine tasks resulting only in incremental advances. After all, what my depression called for was not quality, but a fixation, please, do not leave me alone with myself and my thoughts, give me something to steal time away from me. And for about a week, Mech Arena had me. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t. I have to be honest about that.
The never-ending war to establish ~Games As Art~ exposes a deep-seated inferiority complex in the games industry. So defensive, saying some games don’t “count”. But they’re not alone, either. Problematic Martin Scorsese says Marvel movies aren’t cinema, racist Ben Shapiro says rap isn’t music. How many hours are we to spend arguing what is and isn’t “kino”? How many conversations have you had where someone says in derision that something isn’t cinema, isn’t music, isn’t poetry, isn’t literature, isn’t a game, isn’t art? None of these words are assessments of quality, they are flat descriptors, but in order to elevate oneself, you can use it as if it’s a special club that only you control the entry to.
Mech Arena: Robot Showdown is undeniably a video game. I’ve heard people say, outright, that mobile games “don’t count”. Hell, I’ve probably said it too, albeit years ago. But it’s just absurd. Not only are games like Mech Arena games, they are more representative of what games are right now than anything else. I wish I could tell you that the best example of gaming is somewhere on itch.io, but we don’t live in that world. We live in a world of whale-hunters. Freemium skinnerware, multi-level marketing, and crypto-games. That’s video games, baby.
I resent Mech Arena, but I can’t deny what it is, because, barring the abolition of money, this is what video games are, and will be for the foreseeable future. As much as I wish gachapon had stayed in the realm of toy dispensers, this is where we are. Nothing about its repulsiveness is unique. It’s a synecdoche of the problems endemic to the industry. I’m thankful I am not easily made prey to these tactics, but I must always remember to recognize it. Games are embedded in our society, they seek to exploit and expand, eroding the magic circle as best they can. Video games are part of capitalism, and Mech Arena is yet another reminder to accept it. This is gaming, whether I like it or not.
It perhaps indicates the relative severity of my current darling depressive episode that I was drawn to Mech Arena: Robot Showdown. I don’t like playing games on my phone, I am not competitive, and the context I first heard of this game was during the sycophantic extravaganza that is The Game Awards. But hey. Guess what? It’s got stompy robots. And I love stompy robots. And video games, with their natural talent of alchemizing long stretches of time into a forgotten blink, are a natural fit for a case of melancholy. So I submitted to my most degenerate impulses and hit download.
It’s nothing too shocking. It’s an arena of mechs. Exactly what it says on the tin. You spawn into a level, and fight other players on teams, either with control points or a team deathmatch. This is bog standard stuff, and it’s immediately clear to me that this game is very interested in being like Overwatch. It’s everywhere, from its end-of-match medal system, to the architecture, to the design of its mechs, to the minutiae of its UI elements. Presumably, there was a design document somewhere that said “EVERYONE IS D.VA” that somehow got turned into a game.
There’s maybe a dozen different mechs available at this point, all with different special abilities and stats. There’s also a bunch of different weapons which have some decent variance. The early ones are the most boring: a mech with a sprint, a mech with a jump, a mech with a shield. You know, really exciting mechanical hooks. The mechs have two weapon slots each, which are customizable. Almost all the weapons also have an absurdly long reload period (like, usually over 5 seconds) so combat has this lovely tendency to result in two opposing players circling each other unable to do anything. I presume this could be to encourage teamwork, but uh… it’s a mobile game. Not gonna happen, hoss. (While I’m nitpicking, why can’t I listen to podcasts or music when I’m playing this damn game? That’s the whole point!) Mechs also serve as this kind of lives system; you can only use a given mech once per match/round.
The more interesting mechs take a while to unlock, so the early game is kind of dull until you get them. All you can really do is clomp around and shoot a few rounds off. Theres a pretty generous aim assist, which I guess makes sense, but it feels kinda mindless. Apparently, the game is going to be adding pilots in the near future, which maybe can give some much needed personality to the game. Once you manage to get one of the cool robots, the wackier elements make the game significantly more fun. For example, there’s this mech called Killshot that has a melee charge that does an ungodly amount of damage on a dangerously short cooldown. So I equipped a laser weapon so I can chip enemies down from a distance and then close the distance and kill them with the dash. I cackle pretty much every time I do it. It’s very silly, but silly is a good thing sometimes. I also developed a long-range sniper build paired with homing missiles that erased health bars near-instantly. I have no idea if this is balanced or the rate at which these strategies diminish in efficacy, but I would be lying if I didn’t squeeze every drop of fun I could from it and licked it up like a cat on a dish of warm milk. Because it’s just mindless stompy mech fights. It’s adequate, and at its best, it’s dumb fun. That’s what I wanted, and that’s what I got.
Stop. Hold on. You probably thought (and reasonably so) that I was just describing the game that is Mech Arena: Robot Showdown to you. But you’d be sorely mistaken. Because it’s not a game about big stompy robots duking it out and shooting big guns. Mech Arena is a game about making numbers go up by any means necessary.
Stop me if this sounds familiar. Mechs and weapons have star rankings and levels. Lower ranked mechs not only have less health, but less energy, too, and thus can’t equip stronger weapons. Without that firepower, you’ll quickly find that you can’t do a damn thing in a firefight. This isn’t a game of twitch skill where you can perfectly evade and outplay an overpowered enemy. You’re a big lumbering machine, and even the spryest mechs won’t outrun bullets. There’s skill involved, sure. But the numbers game can outpace that quickly.
How do you increase their power? Well, Mech Arena’s version of Overwatch loot crates, rather than being cosmetic focused, are mostly a way to increase your power. (Even watching these boxes open reminds me of Overwatch.) There are paint-jobs and skins in there, sure, but you’re mostly getting blueprints (which are used to power up specific mechs/weapons) and other currencies (which also help you level up). You can also, of course, cough up some money and just get some of that stuff straight away, or buy a bunch of loot boxes.
You recognize it, don’t you? The creeping sensation? I’ll go on. There are like five or more separate currencies in this game that all do different things. Everytime you open the game, you’re bombarded with pop-ups that tell you about a new deal in the store you can snag. Hell, you’ll get bombarded with those offers in between matches, too, forcing you to tap the X button repeatedly before you can get back to playing the damn game. At some point, I discovered that the company that made this game, Plarium Games, are the same folks behind Raid: Shadow Legends, a gacha RPG that has quite literally become a meme because of its horrible monetization and incessant sponsorships. (If you’ve never heard of this game, you’re incredibly lucky and I envy you.) Around this time, it starts coming into focus. This is a storefront with a game attached to it, not the other way around.
Gacha games make my skin crawl. There’s something Machiavellian about them. The first gacha I ever played was Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare, and I hated what it did to my brain. I never spent money and didn’t get obsessive, but even still, I hated feeling how the game sunk its fingers into my life, occupied my thoughts about time. I put a bit of time into World Flipper but lost interest quickly. I have friends who mark out hard for Granblue or Fate, and while I could give them a chance, I have a sneaking suspicion that I would hate those games, too. (I don’t even really like normal VNs…) I have yet to play Genshin Impact and while I suspect I might enjoy it, the very foundation of what gacha games are, which is glorified and overly complex gambling, skeeves me out. While Mech Arena might not technically be a gacha game, the hints of gacha design are everywhere.
Still, in my depressive stupor, I fixated on a simple goal: unlock Arachnos. There was an event in the game with daily missions, essentially functioning as another free Battle Pass. (Oh, by the way, did I mention this game has a Battle Pass, too?) There always seems to be one or two of these events thrown at the player; it’s a great way of driving attachment and daily play, after all. The final prize at the end of this specific event is Arachnos, a big spider mech (four legs instead of eight, though) whose special ability makes a turret. And I’d be lying if I don’t love a spidery mech. So I worked to acquire Arachnos, in all her mystique.
But of course, that’s not how this story ends. I will not be seeing Arachnos. See, as I plucked away at these daily quests, I started to notice that there were routinely ones that instructed me to share a referral link. Now, I may have stooped low enough to put time into this damn game, but come on. Is this a pyramid scheme? I would do anything for mechs, but I won’t do that. There are seven days in the event, and five on each day. I don’t need to complete every single mission, just 30 of them. I’ve done the math. But they keep showing up. I know if 6 of these show up, I can’t get Arachnos. It’s day 6, and I see the fifth referral mission, and I know if I see another one tomorrow, my time has been wasted. And then I see the next mission. “Make an in-game purchase.” Fuck. The deal is done. Absolutely not. I’m not getting this fucking mech. The terms are clear. Mech Arena refuses to be contained to an app. It says, “What magic circle?” The game has to expand into your pockets or into your friends list. The sunk cost burrowing in my brain, I feel myself tempted to just put down a dollar or beg a close friend just to download the game for a minute. But I close the game. And I don’t open it again.
It’s at this point that I ask myself: are we gaming, fellas? Is this really what video games are? Am I to accept that what I spend an inordinate amount of time doing is so easily reduced to a frenzied parody of capitalism, embroiled so deeply in it already? That they are so easily full of cruelty and emptiness? Is this really gaming?
And the answer, of course, is absolutely.
You know, in my everlasting snootiness, it’s so tempting to give into pretension. I know I’m not alone. But it’s crucial to never forget how fickle one’s own proclivities are. Fascinations and fixations make bedfellows, leading to grotesque but irresistible obsessions. The natural extent of that, in a way, is a game like Mech Arena, an infinite series of asinine tasks resulting only in incremental advances. After all, what my depression called for was not quality, but a fixation, please, do not leave me alone with myself and my thoughts, give me something to steal time away from me. And for about a week, Mech Arena had me. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t. I have to be honest about that.
The never-ending war to establish ~Games As Art~ exposes a deep-seated inferiority complex in the games industry. So defensive, saying some games don’t “count”. But they’re not alone, either. Problematic Martin Scorsese says Marvel movies aren’t cinema, racist Ben Shapiro says rap isn’t music. How many hours are we to spend arguing what is and isn’t “kino”? How many conversations have you had where someone says in derision that something isn’t cinema, isn’t music, isn’t poetry, isn’t literature, isn’t a game, isn’t art? None of these words are assessments of quality, they are flat descriptors, but in order to elevate oneself, you can use it as if it’s a special club that only you control the entry to.
Mech Arena: Robot Showdown is undeniably a video game. I’ve heard people say, outright, that mobile games “don’t count”. Hell, I’ve probably said it too, albeit years ago. But it’s just absurd. Not only are games like Mech Arena games, they are more representative of what games are right now than anything else. I wish I could tell you that the best example of gaming is somewhere on itch.io, but we don’t live in that world. We live in a world of whale-hunters. Freemium skinnerware, multi-level marketing, and crypto-games. That’s video games, baby.
I resent Mech Arena, but I can’t deny what it is, because, barring the abolition of money, this is what video games are, and will be for the foreseeable future. As much as I wish gachapon had stayed in the realm of toy dispensers, this is where we are. Nothing about its repulsiveness is unique. It’s a synecdoche of the problems endemic to the industry. I’m thankful I am not easily made prey to these tactics, but I must always remember to recognize it. Games are embedded in our society, they seek to exploit and expand, eroding the magic circle as best they can. Video games are part of capitalism, and Mech Arena is yet another reminder to accept it. This is gaming, whether I like it or not.