We've been pretty hard on Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire in the past, and with good reason. The last couple of times we played it, the giant-robot simulator was flat, lifeless and clumsy, with mechs trudging around in barren environments that were little more than window dressing for unremarkable th꧑ird-person shooting.
In the short span of time since then, though, the game has gone through a whole raft of improvements. When we saw it during Sony's PS3 preview event in San Fraﷺncisco, it was nearly complete, and while it didn't exactly 💯blow our minds, it's starting to look like a strong contender for launch day.
While our last couple of stabs at the game were set in dull desert-canyon and jungle landscapes, this was the first time we actually got a chance to bust up some buildings. In the game's first mission (for the Earth storyline, anyway - we haven't seen too much of the opposing Zeon ཧcampaign yet), our nameless pilot was charged with testing out the GM, a mech developed by Earth's forces to counter the towering, one-eyed Zeon Zakus. This meant stomping through a little ruined city and blasting a few captured Zakus as they lurched out from behind the shells of buildings.
The actual combat was largely the same stuff we'd seen before,ও but it felt a little smoother and looked a little flashier. Enemies can be locked onto easily, at which point you can let loose with head-mounted cannons, your mech's assault rifle or whatever other long-range weapons you're carrying. Alternately, yo🌠u can zoom in on specific parts in sniper mode, or dash up close with your robot's jetpack and start taking your enemies apart with a giant lightsaber.
One of Gundam's cool features is that its robots can be dismembered and handicapped, something we saw firsthand as the enemies blew our 💝mech's head clean off. It turns out that headlessness is a problem you can live with, as all it really does is take out your radar. Far more problematic was the loss of our GM's right hand; since the left hand was carrying a shield, and because our head-cannons had been sheared off, this left us unable to fight back - at least until we figured out how to drop the shield and use our left hand to deal damage.
