Mecha Break beta hands-on – a live service game that’s more than meets the eye

After already proving a smash hit on Steam, with its most recent beta, GameCentral goes hands-on with an array of impressively designed giant robots in online shooter Mecha Break. After a successful initial test in August last year, Mecha Break’s second beta has launched to even higher acclaim on Steam. The third person competitive shooter, themed around giant robots, became one of the top five most played games on the platform within hours of its second open beta going live on Sunday, surpassing Apex Legends and GTA 5 with over 317,000 concurrent players.

Over recent years, several live service games have achieved huge launch numbers only to dwindle in popularity months later, but Mecha Break’s design feels antithetical to others in the space. This isn’t a shooter designed to appeal to the broadest audience possible for a quick buck, but a mechanically rich and complex game with a steep learning curve, squarely gunning for mech aficionados raised on Gundam and Transformers.

My personal history with giant robots is rooted in Titanfall 2, Armored Core 6, and crying at Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant, but even without much knowledge of the cultural touchstones this game is leaning into, Mecha Break is a chaotic blast which feels like it could inspire a love of the concept – and the joys of mastering and customising a mechanical behemoth – for a whole new generation.

Ahead of the second beta’s launch, we went hands-on with the demo at the US offices of the China-based developer Amazing Seasun Games, at one point alongside the company’s CEO and Mecha Break executive producer Kris Kwok. After around five hours, it felt like we had only just started to grasp all the intricacies under the hood, and with only a small selection of the 13 total mechs (known as Strikers) on offer.

This isn’t because of bad tutorials – although the linear corridor run used to teach you the basics is weirdly divorced from the game’s main modes – but a compliment to its design. You start out with the attacker mech Alysnes, which has an all-rounder arsenal balanced between shooting with energy autocannons, gauss cannons loaded with explosive arrows, and smacking enemies up close with a laser halberd. They can also counter incoming attacks with a shield, which can be used to parry sword attacks if timed correctly, and replenish supplies through an airdrop kit you can only use once per life.

The art of Mecha Break is mastering when best to use these abilities in conjunction with the energy-dependent movement. You can walk at a glacial pace at any point, as hulking mechs are bound to do, but much like Armored Core, the crux of the movement is in its boosting. You can strafe around the battlefield either continuously or in specific bursts and launch yourself skywards to scrap with enemies in the air or fly to safety.

As a mech fantasy, it feels excellent, thanks to the breadth of abilities and the penalties of pushing things too far. Outside of your primary weapons, your abilities are tied to cooldown meters, while continuous boosting beyond the limits of your energy bar will lead to a short window where you’re locked to the ground without an easy means of escape.

At the start, Mecha Break feels like a frenetic toy box for intricate action figures, where it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the rocket barrage spectacle, but there’s a compelling learning curve in managing your movements and weapons in perfect sync.

This is only accentuated by the variety of mechs on offer. Beyond Alysnes, which feels like the obvious starting place on the roster, we tried out Welkin – a heavy brawler which prioritises melee attacks. It’s devastating at close range, with the ability to trap opponents in a boxed laser field, cage match style, so you can hack at them with a spinning battle axe and boomerang drones.

The main mech we gravitated towards was Tricera, although that’s probably because he felt overpowered in a similar way to Bastion in early Overwatch. This tank defender can transform into a deadly stationary sentry gun, crunching through opponents with its double gatling guns and shoulder rockets.

As you might expect, movement is Tricera’s biggest weakness, so agile mechs like Skyraider and Falcon – which feel ripped out of Star Fox in the way they can fly around at fast speeds and perform loops – can be particularly bothersome. Beyond the mechs themselves, Mecha Break is stacked with a surprising number of modes. The crux of the experience is the 6v6 objective-based slate, where every map offers spins on familiar game types, such as a key orientated take on Capture The Flag, a payload escorting mission, and one where you fight to defend control areas à la Domination in Call Of Duty. If you want a traditional deathmatch, this is locked to a 3v3 mode called Ace Arena.

The main new mode for the second beta is Mashmak, a PvPvE mode for up to 60 players which emulates The Division’s extraction mode, Dark Zone, with battle royale elements. In a squad of three, you work together to take down enemy camps, defeat bosses, retrieve loot, and escape from the huge map at one of the five marked extraction points. Once a team has occupied an extraction point, however, you’re locked out of it, which makes every subsequent battle to escape even more perilous if you want to maximise your gains.