Metal Fatigue is one of those games that blew me away when it was new. It had fantastic graphics at the time. It is riddled with cool features. The map has three layers - underground, ground and "sky" (or something like that) - that require different kinds of units. It has possibly the first instance of air combat in an RTS that looks great. There's customizable mechs that can engage in melee combat with (at the time) great animations and mech crews that gain experience. You can damage hostile mechs and then steal a body part of theirs, bring it home and attach it to your own mech. It sounds really awesome on paper. However, this stuff does not really add up to anything great and the whole thing can be described as a poor man's Total Annihilation. There's no particular depth to it, the factions don't differ much, the game is very slow and the enemy tends to rebuild his base on a layer you already cleared out before. Especially the underground layer, where visibility is limited and your mechs can't enter, is very boring to fight in and the place where the enemies tend to hide like cockroaches. It doesn't help that there's infinite resource that regenerate slowly, however, so the game can drag on forever and come to a crawl. Whenever I feel like firing this one up again and wonder "why did I never finish it? it was awesome!" I remember that it's just darn boring and I usually give up by the third mission. I still have a soft spot for the game if only for the many unique ideas it had. If, like me, you are sentimental when it comes to games from that era, especially RTS games, you should definitely give it a try but don't expect another Warzone 2100 or Earth 2150.
It's no secret that Shadow Tactics is a Commandos clone. Let's be honest, though: there hadn't quite been any "Commandos-likes" in a long time, so that alone makes Shadow Tactics worth playing but I can honestly say that ST is easily the best game in this genre thus far. What ST does well is that it focuses on recreating the magic of the original Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, unlike any of its successors and other clones that, in my opinion, unnecessarily bloated the formula with too convoluted missions and too many mechanics. Lots of the stuff in the game is just a reskin of things from BeL and all of the additions are perfectly legitimate and genuinely enhance the gameplay. You can hide in bushes, there's night missions where you're generally less visible but light sources are hugely dangerous, there's a lot of climbing and kinda platforming. Your characters are generally more useful and there's lots of small enhancements like cones gradually filling up when you're spotted, often giving you time to get out of danger, and Shadow Mode which makes it super easy to set up synchronised actions for multiple characters. There's nothing quite as satisfying as setting up a combined move for all your characters that brutally brings down multiple enemies at once. And something I appreciated very much were distinct enemy types that can be easily told apart, have distinct behavioural patterns and require different approaches. Especially samurai, who can see through disguises and are generally hard to kill, were a brilliant addition. Why only four stars, though? For one, I didn't feel the story was particularly captivating nor did the game make best use of its historical setting. There's no big surprises and the characters are pretty shallow. The other thing is that the game is still utterly based on scumsaving which feels very out of place in a modern title and could have been handled better. None of that keeps the game from being the best title in the genre, however.
