Battle Engine Aquila

It's a Mecha-like game with the gimmick of transformation between Mech and jet. Cool visual styling, ok graphics, fun action, boring story and that's about it. Coming to think of it - this is just like Gun Metal, which came out about 6 months earlier.

This game is neither a revolution nor a breakthrough (at least by today means) but is very satisfying once you get used with the controls (there is some arificial lag in walker mode, so you feel like manning the turret) and got the physics. When you learn how to utilize power the best way, that buildings do produce enemies and you have to destroy them to stop enemy forces (the same for landing crafts), that you can land on enemy ships and huge carrier planes to recharge and to attack them. And become sensible of constant radio chatter that brings important information, follow mission objectives the game immediately becomes smooth. You feel the progress, you feel that you do have accomplishments and overall the game is rewarding. Good design makes dated graphics very much OK and there is true feel that you operate on vast areas. Gunfight is intense, your allies fight rather good and you don't babysit them. Depending on your mission performace you can unlock alternative mission path (harder, as I understood) and you can choose different configurations of you vehicle. There is replay value if you want to have some fun playing alternative way. There are some unlockable extras but I personally find nothing special there. My summary: a good old fun playing occasional level or two enjoying how mighty your battle engine can be if you get the controls and understand the gameplay and physics they were ment to be. Something really good and not that old to be percieved obsolete.

The whole transformable mech thing is nice, the music is good, the visuals are satisfying and the gameplay is easy to get into. The helper troops are nice to fight alongside, but are rarely needed; they are more like flavour. The cutscenes also add quite a bit of flavour; they even did them in-engine. The problems come in when you get into the actual missions: A lot of missions have objectives that force you to do JUST ONE THING, when you could've taken the entire island solo; this can be very annoying. The next problem is that a bunch of missions have a 'you cannot lose more then half your troops' objective. This is also sometimes not even listed in the objectives. You can be ONE building away from victory and suddenly hear 'we took too many losses'. This one in paticular enrages me due to the fact that I can usually solo an entire island!

Played this game all the way back on the Original Xbox and it still feels fresh playing it today. How many games can you think of that lets you pilot a mech that can transform into a fighter jet?