Mecha BREAK is Making the Mecha Genre Personal - gamescom 2024

For something as popular in the modern culture as the Mecha genre, there should definitely be more games set in it. Sure, there’s Armored Core, Titanfall, Daemon X Machina, there were Mechwarriors and BattleTechs, remakes of Front Mission and failed Gundam games. Amazing Seasun Games clearly thought the same, as they made Meacha BREAK.

Mecha BREAK is, in its essence, a competitive character shooter. There are the same roles you would expect from such a game: quick and agile scouts, heavy tanks, scrappy fighters, fragile snipers. And it’s quite competent at what it does. It will compete with the games you wouldn’t thought it’d be competing against.

But why the third-person Mecha shooter? When I asked the devs, why they even made a Mecha game, the answer was quite relatable. Turners out, the founder of the studio also felt the same way that there aren’t enough great Mecha games nowadays. He is a massive fan of the genre, and according to the developers present at gamescom, he has a massive wall filled with various figures, posters, and other memorabilia.

A natural question that arose afterward was about the influences — what was the biggest inspiration for the mech designs? Turns out, it was pretty much everything. There are Mechas inspired by Armored Core, Gundam, Transformers, even Zone of the Enders. And the developers don’t shy away from this, don’t try to change the topic when some other game or a piece of media comes up.

Because they love those games, movies, anime as much as we do.

Another point that the developers made a point of is how much personalization there is. You create your own character even if you will spend less than 1% of your time with your game outside of your Mecha. You customize and paint it the way you want, all to make it uniquely yours. The developers have noticed that many similar games have failed because people haven’t managed to make any personal connection with them, among other things. So they added more character to what ultimately is a character action game.

But what’s most important is how it plays. Before going to gamescom, I managed to play the available playtest for a bit. I was playing one of the heavier Mechas, so when I made it to Cologne, I decided to try a completely different playstyle, so I picked the light sniper. I absolutely didn’t do well, but this also proved a point – this playstyle of constant stealth and long-range support was absolutely out of my wheelhouse, especially since it was difficult to adjust to the fast and erratically moving enemies. When someone reaches you on a sniper – you’re just dead.

Curiously, the developers told me that during the closed playtest this spring, snipers were by far the most performing class, so they were heavily nerfed before the open beta.

This brought on another question, that of balance and patches. The devs said that they will closely monitor the community feedback and try to promptly iron out any kinks, but there’s also an idea in their minds that community complaints are not always correct: sometimes, player approach is what needs adjustment, and what the players of one class find to be broken is actually balances in the grand scheme of things.

Nevertheless, they identified the lack of support as another issue that killed many games, so they intend to give us lots of attention, be it balance changes or new content.

It’s hard to predict right now whether or not Mecha BREAK will be a success. There are so many details that go into the successful live-service product that are just beyond the scope of the quality of gameplay or visuals – matchmaking speed, stability of the connection, even the ephemeral “feel.” But as far as we’re concerned, if all else is of a sufficient level, the game has enough qualities to be a hit.

There’s no official release date for Mecha BREAK yet, so go ahead and wishlist it on Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S.