E3 06: IGPX Hands-On

LOS ANGELES--Based on the hit futuristic racing anime currently airing in America on Cartoon Network, IGPX the game follows a three-man team of futuristic racers as they race along the 60-mile courses that make up the IGPX racing series, traveling in specialized battle mechs that can reach speeds in excess of 350mph. If any anime is destined for video game stature, this is it. Today, we had a chance to try out this Namco Bandai-published sci-fi racing combat game on the floor of the Electronic Entertainment Expo. While the game's speed and nonstop action are undeniable, its controls sometimes left us feeling a bit flat.

An IGPX race isn't just about who crosses the finish line first; at the more advanced levels, it's about who can manage to survive the race. Thanks to the nearly nonstop mech-on-mech combat, you simply don't have much time to concentrate on anything but causing as much damage as possible. Luckily the game makes this fairly easy by handling a lot of the racing mechanics for you. In fact, beyond some very basic controls for steering and periodic speed boosts to the mech, there's not much to the racing controls, leaving plenty of room for fighting. And boy, is there a lot of fighting.

Full IGPX races consist of two teams of three mechs racing in cooperation with one another, and each mech in the team has slightly different configurations and capabilities. FWs seem to play sort of like wide receivers in football and are usually the fastest mechs on the track. DFs, on the other hand, are bulkier and slightly slower and more adept at combat and better suited to taking blows from other competitors. Finally, the MF mechs are somewhere in between, with a good balance of speed and power. To further customize your team, you can choose assignments for each mech on the team. There are three commands to choose from: race, neutral, or battle. A well-balanced team will spread the responsibility among all three mechs in the game, letting the big guys focus on combat, while the sleeker mechs concentrate on getting the lead and staying there.

Regardless of how you deal out your team assignments, you'll have the ability to switch between mechs in the race by clicking on the R3 button (in other words, pressing down on the right analog stick). Once the race begins, you'll want to keep your eyes on your opponents at all times--holding the L1 button will let you switch your camera from a forward view to a rear view, and you'll be able to attack your opponents at any angle and continue moving forward at full speed. That's just what IGPX mechs are designed to do, you see.

In terms of combat controls, all of the attacks we saw in the game were melee-based, so you'll have to get pretty close to your opponents to deal damage. Attacks were pulled off with the circle and X buttons respectively, and you could guard against damage by holding the R1 button. You could even issue updated partner commands by pressing the directional pad in various directions, but frankly, we never got around to it; instead, we preferred to do our fighting ourselves. We even discovered combo attacks by pressing successive combinations of the two buttons, and a few tandem attacks, where we could issue twice the pain by ganging up on a single opponent and switch between attackers for maximum carnage. While the attacks were pretty fun to pull off, we were a bit put off by the difficulty of the game--even at the lowest difficulty setting, the opponent mechs seemed overly aggressive and, worse yet, overly accurate with their attacks, leaving us on the wrong end of the damage meter after many encounters.

In between races, you'll be able to upgrade your IGPX mechs with new parts, such as arms and legs, which are rated along four different categories: offense, defense, agility, and stability. In addition, there are extras you can purchase and attach to your mech, which will give you speed boosts, up your stability ratings, or improve your defensive capabilities. Finally, you can add a finishing touch to your IGPX team by choosing from a number of colorful paint schemes.

While the controls take some getting used to, there's little denying that IGPX's premise is a cool one. With massive courses that twist, turn, and loop along futuristic cityscapes, a sleek, sci-fi look and feel that is definitely in keeping with the show's aesthetic (it doesn't hurt that the game is boasting the American voice talent from the Cartoon Network show, at least as best as we could tell amid the E3 din), and virtually nonstop action, IGPX is poised to please fans of the anime series. We'll keep you informed on how the game progresses as we approach its release toward the end of this year.