Battle Engine Aquila Review (PC)

Battle Engine Aquila was a so-so game on the consoles, and now Lost Toys has ported it over so it can become a so-so title for the PC. Both the story and the game are very straightforward. You are a crack pilot named Hawk who is drafted by the Forseti military and must take the on the controls of an experimental weapon called Aquila. Aquila is primarily a ground-based weapon, resembling a mech with spider legs, but can transform into an aircraft with limited flight capabilities. Using this secret weapon, Hawk will try to fight back against the evil Muspell forces. Aquila's main weakness, other than its limited flight time, is that it is not amphibious. Water will instantly destroy Aquila. I mean, touch the water a little bit and the thing will explode! Somebody better talk to the designer of this thing before the Muspells arm themselves with super-soakers! Needless to say, many of your missions will take place over the sea, or on islands where flying over water will become necessary. Completing missions will also unlock art and multiplayer levels.

There are twenty-seven missions in total, separated by cut-sequences, most of them requiring you to defend something, such as bases, boats, or planes. Completing the primary objectives will continue the story, while completing all the secondary objectives will allow you to take branching alternate missions. The alternate missions don't differ too much from the main sequences until later in the game. One thing that greatly annoyed me were the shifts in volume when going from game to cut-scenes. At its default settings, the movies are almost whisper in comparison to the in-game music and noise, and there is no master control to set both at once. Sure, it's easy enough to set the in-game volume down and manually turn up the volume on my speakers, but it doesn't bode well for a game when the designers can't catch that kind of oversight and match both sound designs.

Aquila's ground mode allows for a great deal of movement, including missile dodging and strafing around tanks. However, besides actually taking flight, the mech lacks any kind of jumping ability. The available arsenal ranges from energy weapons that require no ammunition to standard machine guns and rockets that you'll eventually need to rearm. Each gun has its particular strengths and weaknesses. For example, energy weapons are better for buildings and tanks. Bullets are better against infantry. The weapon effects are pretty standard, and really aren't anything that will have you jumping out of your seat. You shoot something long enough, it blows up, then disappears. The auto-aiming (leftover from when it was a console game), coupled with the fact that many of the projectile guns have target-lock capabilities, takes away any need for accuracy.

At no point did I really feel like I was truly in a towering, powerful, machine of war. Sure, Aquila is a lot bigger than the tanks and infantry that try repeatedly to storm bases and islands, but could I step on any of them? Nope. At best, I could knock over a few trees. Buildings are fun to shoot at because they fall apart according to where you shoot them. However, I found it absolutely unbelievable that half destroyed shell of a building could still churn out tanks and infantry. I mean, you can literally see straight through the building, and it's pretty much nothing but a collection sticks, but that's still enough to produce vehicles at a normal pace.

One of the more interesting aspects of the game is the fact that Aquila can transform into jet mode and fly around for short periods of time. Flying takes up energy, and Aquila will need to periodically recharge by changing back into walker mode. Remember the bit about water? While some of the missions, such as when Aquila is being transferred to another base by boat, are obviously contrived to take advantage of the mech's weaknesses, it does make for some challenging gameplay. Luckily, you can choose between a number of different wingmen, each with their own particular strengths, such as tank-busting or dogfighting. I hardly noticed them when combat started, but according to their radio chatter, I believe they shot down quite a few ships, but their usefulness isn't exceptionally noteworthy.

Everything about this game is standard and run-of-the mill. Even the graphics, which seems to have gotten up upgrade from its console incarnation, are pretty forgettable. I mean, not even the water looks especially great, which is strange, considering there's so much of it! There's no water spray, which probably for the best, considering it would probably kill you. The only notable graphics are the buildings when they fall apart, and your energy weapon when it gets upgraded to release a huge blast that takes up the whole screen. However, even that isn't terribly impressive. A lot of sounds appear to be missing or are too faint to be noticed. Trees don't crack when they get knocked over. Engine sounds in jet mode are pretty quiet. There's no ground thumping as your giant robot tank lumbers around the battlefield. You don't even hear the sounds of the ocean, which is a considerable oversight since most missions take place on islands. The voice acting is decent, with a couple of different accents thrown into the mix, but nothing that really stands out.

The worst bit is the multiplayer, which received no attention when it was ported from the consoles. Players will either have to shell out money for a gamepad or two, or learn to share the keyboard, because BEA only supports split screen mode! There are no options for LAN or Internet play, which is totally ridiculous! Lost Toys should have had the dedication to properly adapt this game to the new platform. Then the game would be a little bit better.

In the end, BEA isn't really much of anything besides an average arcade shooter. It isn't a bad game, but there's nothing exceptional here either. This is not a title that screams, "Buy me!" The mech mode doesn't have anywhere near the depth of other mech games, and the same could be said about the flight mode. Many of the missions lack variety - destroy everything in sight and protect as much as you can - and the total number of weapons are pretty small. The enemy units aren't very spectacular either, even with the upgraded graphics. They are things that many gamers have seen before, and done better in other games. Toss in the fact that the limited multiplayer hardly seems appropriate for PC gamers (unless they enjoy crowding around the same monitor) and things start to look worse and worse for the Aquila. All these signs point in one direction: Obscurity.

Our Final ScoreBad

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