Steambot Chronicles Battle Tournament: an old review

Sorry folks, I haven't had time to finish what I'm currently working on, so that's going to have to wait for next week. Instead, I have a treat- an old review I wrote back in 2009 for Steambot Chronicles: Battle Tournament for the PSP. It was...ugh. Just read for yourself.


Today, I'm going to tell you about a game I took back to the store.

Let me start with a little background info. The original Steambot Chronicles was a PS2 game that became sort of a cult hit. It combined sandbox gameplay wth a bizarre but interesting world, along with a system for creating some of the most original mechs you'll ever see.

The mechs in the series tend to look like someone took an old car, removed the wheels, and added arms and legs to the body. That is to say, they're really unique and lend a lot of personality to a genre that's barely changed since it was created. My only gripe with them is that the series calls them "Trotmobiles".

<rant>

What in the hell were they smoking when they thought that "Trotmobile" would be a good name for a car-robot thing as tall as an average house? That's got to be one of the worst names for a main gameplay mechanic I've ever heard. No matter how imposing some of the mechs (that is what I will be calling them from here on) were supposed to be, I could never take them seriously because every single character never stopped saying the word Trotmobile.

</rant>

To simplify things, the first one was a unique sandbox game. But we're not talking about that one today, now are we?

First of all, this game decides that a plot would be below it and gives you the patented Pokemon opening instead, that is to say, you want to be the very best and show your opponents the power that's inside.

The game claims to be a sandbox game like its predecesor. It even says it on the back of the box. That blurb is one of the most blatant acts of false advertising I've ever seen. You do two things in the entire game- take jobs from the job center to earn money and fame until the game decides you've grinded enough, then go to the colliseum for a few fights. Then you'll ascend in rank, and you have to go back to doing grunt work for a while.

You can go back and fight any previous battles over again, but it only earns you money, and you need fame to get to the next rank and progress in the game. Here's something I don't understand- why is it that you can't earn fame from fights? It certainly makes a lot more sense than doing it by delivering a newspaper to a hermit in the middle of the fucking North Pole (not kidding). It's not like he's going to brave the frozen wasteland to come see you, so what's the point?

So no, the jobs aren't fun. But what really makes them bad is the sheer amount of effort it takes to just do one.

<rant 2>

Most games that involve questing use a very similar pattern. You go to point A, find out what you're doing, go to point B, do it, and report back to point A.

Not this game.

To do a job in SCBT you have to head near point A, get out of your mech, walk slowly to the job center, go through an unnecessarily long menu to confirm, walk veeeeery slowly back to your mech, ride to point B where you receive instructions, go to area C where the job needs to be done, find location D deep in the area, do whatever the hell you need to do (usually takes 10-30 seconds tops) ride all the way back to point B to report, park, and WALK YOUR SLOW ASS BACK TO POINT A TO GET YOUR ALL TOO WELL DESERVED CASH.

The exhausting feeling you have after reading that last run-on sentence is but a fraction of what you'll feel during each and every task in this game.

</rant 2>

I've made a visual aid. Let's look, shall we?

HOW HARD IS THAT, STEAMBOT CHRONICLES? IS IT TOO COMPLEX?

It doesn't help that the fights are boring too. Every fight lasts for two minutes. You run and hop like a fool while clobbering the other person. The fights are laughably easy- the AI doesn't seem to grasp what a combo is until the last fight of the game, meaning that they'll only hit you once or twice at most before exploding, assuming you don't stop and sit perfectly still too often. And as if they were trying to minimize the enjoyment, the higher ranked fights are fewer in number. Yes, you end up spending less and less time actually fighting as the game progresses. Brilliant.

There's actually quite a bit of customizing to do, but it's really all for naught because nearly all of the weapons are inadequate. Firearms are almost all useless because using them forces you to stand still and shoot straight in front of you. This process can be interrupted, and if it is all you did was let them hit you. The only firearm worth using is the missile launcher because it homes in with distance, but you get it right before the end of the game and it runs out of ammo extremely fast unless you spend a shitload to upgrade it.

So all that's left is melee combat, and most of that is garbage too. Any weapon that forces you to charge an attack is even worse than a firearm, and most of the others just swing too slow or not enough times. However, there are two weapons that, if used as a pair (meaning you pay for two of them), get a special combo that actually attacks quickly and can do good damage. For the first third of the game this is the mace, and for the last two thirds this is the claw.

Believe me, I tried to use other equipment. I really did. I bought almost every weapon in the game and tried them all. Nothing stood up to the claw. Combined with a light fast mech, the claw rapes everything, including the final boss. Everything else is inferior.

Oh, and there's multiplayer, but I'm fairly certain no one will ever play it. There's no online, so you have to play local, and to actually use a decent mech (CLAWS) you have to have your own copy of the game. I'm fairly certain rounding up 4 people that actually enjoy this garbage and putting them in the same room would destroy the planet somehow.


So the game is boring and easy. Fortunately it's short- I beat the entire game and got the best ending in just over 6 hours, and almost an hour of that was me dicking around with the claw and fighting repeats. This leads to another oddity- there is no credit sequence in the entire game. And I searched, believe you me. I went back and got the other two endings- no credits for them either. I looked online, and it was confirmed. The game will not tell you who was responsible for its creation, I'm assuming because they know what they did and feared for their lives. All we know is that Atlus made it, and if it weren't for the fact that I love Snowboard Kids I would storm their headquarters for this abomination.

The only nice thing I have to say about the game is that the detail for the mechs is quite good. Everything else looks fairly bland (they kept the theme), but presentable. It's certainly not the ugliest PSP game. The voices are ridiculously over the top, but they were actually the most enjoyable part of the whole game, simply because they were worth a chuckle. The music, on the other hand, is composed of a 5 second loop of noise for each area. It's bad. Really bad. Ironically, the most annoying sound bite in the game is the one that plays when you win a fight- a blast of bagpipes with only the faintest idea of what notes they're trying to make. You'd almost rather lose.

In fact...maybe you would. Hell, it can't be worse than continuing the game. Maybe the best way to stop the pain is to submit to the cold harsh grip of death.

Followed by the cold harsh smash of a hammer on the fucking UMD.

Normal stuff resumes next week!