RPG #6: Mobile Weapon Review

Mobile Weapon is a beautiful, well-made game with unfortunately somewhat mediocre gameplay. The basic gist is that you have a mech (the game calls these "MAWs") that you must use to accomplish various tasks. The plot gets fairly interesting eventually, but expect to be trudging around a junkyard looking for spare parts for your uncle and fighting the same two enemies over and over for at least the first 30 minutes or so. In fact, expect to be doing a lot of trudging around looking for items throughout the game, since most of the game's quests revolve around this dynamic.

There can be no doubt that Mobile Weapon is an extremely well-made game. Most in-game graphics were clearly modeled and rendered in 3D, then exported to Flash. The GUI, likewise, is very slick and professional looking, and the movement and combat engines are very smooth and well thought out. Nearly every task in the game, from movement to combat, can be accomplished both entirely via keyboard and entirely via mouse.

This game is much like a traditional RPG in that you advance your characters in one of three stats, which in turn govern which weapons and equipment they can use. The combat, likewise, is typical Final Fantasy fare, but without spells and cool status effects. At any point, you are limited to only two different attacks per character, so sadly there isn't very much strategy involved in combat. True, there are some tactical decisions to be made in terms of which characters to give which weapons, but once your characters learn their limit breaks, there isn't be much point in using conventional attacks anyway.

The bottom line: if you want a well-produced but rather slow-moving FF clone with a futuristic theme, Mobile Weapon is a pretty good bet.