Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor Review(Boulevard of broken dreams)

Forget “You are the controller.” After nearly two years, the mantra for Kinect has proven to be more like, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” Though the gamepad-free gaming device conjured up wondrous images of slick, gesture-driven, Minority Report-style user interfaces upon its introduction, its realities have borne far less ambition -- and even shoddier execution.
Pioneering title Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor is a rare Kinect case where ambition is hardly the problem. Kinect’s first dedicated hybrid game -- meaning the camera works in concert with the Xbox 360 controller at all times -- puts you in the cockpit of a Vertical Tank (read: mech) in a near-future America where a silicon-eating virus has destroyed all of the world’s computers, leaving a global battle with a Korean superpower to be fought using low-tech, analog walking tanks. You pilot one of these VTs from the first-person perspective of silent protagonist Winfield Powers -- alongside the three crew members who also reside in the belly of your metallic beast.

You’ll move the VT and fire its weapons systems entirely with the controller using typical first-person shooter controls, while Kinect gestures operate all of the tank’s other bells and whistles. For example, extend both arms straight ahead to look out the slot-sized viewport (you’ll spend much of your time here); raise your right hand straight up to bring down the long-range periscope; extend one hand or the other to pull out either the left or right access panels, which let you check your external cameras and radar or activate the cockpit ventilation system; swipe in either direction to turn and interact with one of your crew members; or stand up to pop out of the top hatch and survey the battlefield.
Truly, moving from classic Steel Battalion’s proprietary 40-button joystick system to one with virtually no physical inputs is a bold and equally outside-the-box move. (The irony, of course, is that Heavy Armor costs the same $200 as its cult-classic progenitor did if you combine the $150 price tag of Kinect with $50 for a copy of the game.) But while the impressive original was an impeccable, hardcore giant-robot sim that gained instant infamy for its amazing immersion-boosting control system, Heavy Armor is just plain hard -- though it too will probably live on in Xbox lore for all the wrong reasons.

Why should your crew get to bail out when you're stuck here? Sit down, Natch!

Woefully, Heavy Armor is, in practice, a nightmare in nearly all aspects. As we’ve unfortunately come to expect from most Kinect titles, the motion controls are terrible. If we so much as flinched on our couch, the game asked us to re-calibrate the Kinect sensor, and in the heat of battle we had constant issues both at home and in the office with accidentally closing the viewport hatch when we were trying to simply look out the view panel.
Why did we constantly have to keep doing that? Because, in what is likely an attempt to simulate the guttural force of having your VT get rocked by a missile, you’ll be reset to the cockpit view every time you’re hit, meaning you’ll have to scramble just to get back into a viewing angle where you can counterattack before you’re killed.

We'll be comin' round the mountain when we come...

Kinect again frustrates when you’re hit so hard that toxic smoke fills the cockpit. In order to vent it, you have to extend your right hand to grab the control panel, pull back to bring it out to where it’s accessible, then wave your hand around in the air again and hope you can successfully get a grip on the cord you need to yank in order to clear out the smoke before you choke and die. Instead, we were frequently hitting other buttons on that panel or, worse, unable to pull out the panel all the way at all.
Believe it or not, however, Heavy Armor’s Kinect functionality isn’t even the primary culprit of its numerous failings. If this were a controller-based game, it would still be atrocious. The mailslot-sized viewport boasts an old-school iron-sights aiming reticule, and in what we presume is a decision made in the name of simulating the low-tech nature of the VTs, it’s damn near impossible to hit anything at any range beyond point-blank (at which point you’re usually toast) using either the machinegun or the missiles. That means you’ll spend an inordinate amount of time in the periscope. This becomes a problem when you get hit and have your periscope glass cracked and can no longer fire accurately, leaving you exactly zero precision targeting options.

Select missions let you invite three friends to share in the pain with.

Furthermore, we’re not sure we can recall worse examples of mission design than what’s on offer here. One early stage tasks you with lying in wait to ambush a single enemy VT. You must stand up in your living room and peer out from your cockpit to do this, waiting over three real-life minutes (standing the entire time, and yes, we timed it) before finally being allowed to fire up your VT and take him out. And when you drop your lone target, the mission ends! But don’t fail, because then you’ll have to do the whole thing over again. Another level has you shooting a few foes, then hopping out of your mech in a scripted sequence and using Kinect to literally pry intel from an ally’s cold, dead hand. Total mission time: approximately two minutes. Compounding matters, Heavy Armor is often very vague about what exactly your mission objectives are.
Other stages are so painfully, brutally, frustratingly difficult -- a five-minute, timed race against the clock to destroy endless waves of bad guys and a freeway overpass fight against a virtually unstoppable super-mech are among the low-lights -- that we defy anyone to get through them without having the strong urge to shatter their controller and/or throw their Kinect out the window. The awful, inaccurate Kinect controls only make the bad situations worse, leaving Heavy Armor as a great idea fatally crippled by its own technical and design failings.