A spidery, transforming mech. Huge air, land, and sea clashes. A dynamic battlefield bristling with life. Some earnest voice-acting. And a bizarre surprise or three on the land-scarce canvas of a world gone wet. "Battle Engine Aquila" is one busy package. On this week's "Extended Play" we enter the drop zone of a good, solid, and futuristic fragfest that flirts with being excellent.
Water, water everywhere
The first bit of bad news is that it turns out the environmentalists were dead right. In the world of "Battle Engine Aquila," where the polar ice caps have melted, dry land is the scarcest of commodities. The battlefields presented here are either island-bases or vast, trackless wastes of water. The tops of skyscrapers jut up from the waves, often at alarmingly wrong angles.
You play as a hotshot industrial mech jockey pressed into military service as the pilot of Battle Engine Aquila, a sleek, transforming walker/aircraft prototype vehicle. Throughout 23-plus story-driven missions, you'll take part in huge, living battles on land, at sea, and in the air for control of the world's precious bits of dry land.
Welcome to the machine
While your ultra high tech fighting machine, which packs tremendous firepower, is certainly something of an oddity, you're still just another combatant in a larger war. This is part of what makes "Battle Engine Aquila" so intriguing. There's a real, living conflict constantly raging around you, and most of the time it's your job to fill a crucial support role. Sometimes it's clearing out a beach infested with mines and tank traps (to facilitate a Normandy-style landing), or maybe it's softening up the enemy's defense network so friendly air support can come in and flatten the enemy's factories.
Of course, you can do a lot of flattening all by yourself. The battle engine can transform at will (for limited amounts of time) from the aforementioned four-story spidery tank to an aquatic-looking jet that can fill the air with the twisting, anime-style contrails of missile clusters.
With a little practice you can pull off some pretty amazing switch-ups on the fly. You can streak in like a dive-bomber to take out coastal targets from above and then suddenly transform to walker configuration even as you fall through the air. Then, you can use your rocket boosters to throttle in for a soft landing. You can even cook a few enemy troops on the ground with your exhaust! Once on the ground, you're well advised to use your grenades, vulcan cannon, and energy weapons to rip the enemy base.
The little engine that couldn't
Your battle engine is a special prototype, but it's certainly not invincible. Sometimes it's easy to forget that. Just as your comrades rely on you to soften up the enemy's more formidable defenses, you must in turn rely on them. When your battle engine has taken enough damage, you'll need to lift off, land on a friendly repair pad, and restock your ammo. You'll also occasionally have a wingman you can select to accompany you and his support can often mean the difference between success and failure. On the other hand, some battles take place entirely at sea. Since the one thing your battle engine can't do is swim, you must protect friendly sea vessels as they're often the only places to land and recharge your batteries.
Of course, sometimes the best (and coolest) thing to do is land your bad mechanical self right on one of the enemy's sea vessels, or on the hull of a massive, airborne transport. By using this technique, you can attack the enemy like an itch it can't scratch until the cruiser suddenly bursts into flames and (as you jet away to safety) goes plummeting down in a spectacular explosive crash. If you're lucky, it will fall onto something you were meaning to hit anyway!
This level of incidental realism can lead to some incredibly dramatic moments. Intense cross fire between foes can cut down intervening forests, enemy missiles launched against friendly targets can be chased, targeted, and shot down in midflight, and the cruiser you're standing on can be bombed out and sunk from right under your feet -- necessitating a last-second liftoff.
Battle engine tequila?
Alas, such fantastic gameplay moments only throw into sharper relief some of the frustrating oddities that makes one wonder which bottle the designers were hitting when they coded the game's victory conditions. Occasionally, the game will "decide" that the battle has devolved to an unwinnable point -- even as the player is clearly putting the finishing touches on all resistance! Instead of letting the player's ultimate performance (however unorthodox) decide the outcome of a battle, as it should, an arbitrary scheme forces you to give up after a certain point, which can be infuriating.
Unfortunately, there are more problems. In one battle the player is offered two prime targets simultaneously but soon discovers it's nigh impossible to achieve them both. If he goes for the one, the other escapes. This wouldn't be so bad if it were simply an issue of the player's ability. Stopwatch timing proves that if the player "goes outside the script" of what he's expected to do, the game artificially speeds up time (or otherwise fudges things) to make the other objective unreachable. This is poor game design, and it stands in stark contrast to the otherwise rewarding overall experience that "Battle Engine Aquila" provides.
The devil and the deep blue sea
Nevertheless, these occasional glitches in logic haven't stopped us from playing again and again. A good performance on a single-player mission alters the flow of missions and unlocks lots of concept-artwork goodies and movies. Multiplayer options include cooperative as well as skirmish modes. And although many of the single-player battles seem awfully similar (escort the convoy, soften up the defenses, rinse, repeat), the sense of first-person freedom and immersion is rewarding. "Battle Engine Aquila" just misses a top-shelf rating due to some nitpicky decision-making routines, but it's a good gaming start to 2003 and definitely worth a look.