Phantom Crash Preview

If Phantom Crash turns out as smart as it is pretty, then we're in for something quite special. The game, which is being developed by Japanese studio Genki, has you piloting scrappy-looking battle mechs strapped with all sorts of devastating artillery and neat cloaking devices. The setup is very "vehicular combat," with large, complex arenas, deathmatch rules, health and ammo pickups, and spawn points. The pacing is quite similar, though we're inclined to think that "rules" that governed the matches in this preview build aren't quite final. Before we get too deep into that, though, we should expose a bit of the game's background.

Phantom Crash is set in a near-future Tokyo, whose population shares a taste for a very particular form of entertainment--the popular dystopian concept of the killer TV show. In Phantom Crash's Tokyo, young hooligans are televised piloting junky battle mechs for the amusement of the masses. It's sort of a regional sport, with the robots--called "scoobies"--reflecting the high-drama personalities of the pilots. They have names like Holy, Akron, and Photon, and, if the trailers that bookend the game's start-up screen are any indication, the characters themselves will receive something of a spotlight in the final product. One was included in the preview build we had, and it was centered on Holy's pilot, a young, slick Neo-Tokyoite who rides around in a flying snowboard. The whole presentation was very stylized and very much on the Smilebit tip--shots of abstract cityscapes mixed in with montages of hypermanga characters doing extreme-sports stuff. It's all pulled off decently well, to the point of having us believe it initially was a trailer for an altogether different game.

Our limited-content demo let us engage in deathmatches, in any event, as any one of 10 available scoobies. The robots themselves were quite varied in design, as well as in the ways they handled and the payloads they carried. From a design standpoint, Phantom Crash is sort of all over the place--some mechs are curvy and modern-looking, bipedal, and smooth, while others walk on spider legs and have pivoting heads. Still, others have WW1 nose art drawn on them. You'll be able to equip these with all sorts of different weapons and components in the final game, though the options were blacked out in our demo. We were able to mess only with their default weapons sets, which proved, luckily, to be pretty diverse. Each robot can be set up with up to four weapons--one on each arm and shoulder. No weapon type seems hard-coded to any particular part of the frame either, which means you could conceivably strap a machine gun to your shoulder and a rocket launcher to your arm. The weapons themselves included various types of automatic chainguns, close-range shotguns, grenade launchers, missiles, rockets, and more. One robot even had a close-range drill attached to its arm, contact with which meant instant malfunction for enemy robots.

The controls are fairly straightforward--they feel like sort of a combination of Twisted Metal-style controls and those you'd find in a console FPS. Basically, you use the left stick to steer and position your robot and the right one to pivot your head, torso, or what have you for the purpose of aiming. At this point, the controls are almost there, as it were, but some small glitches relegate them to simply "functional" status. Most significantly, the controls get quite wonky when you aren't facing directly forwrd. Specifically, your heading will be centered on the direction that your pivoting extremity is pointing. So if you're askew, your robot will walk like it's drunk. A simple autocorrecting function for the aiming controls would easily remedy this problem, though, so we sure hope that Genki plans to include one. Your arm-mounted weapons, in any event, are mapped to your left and right triggers, while the shoulder-mounted stuff is fired with Y and B. The A button makes you jump, and, depending on which robot you're using, you can catch quite a bit of air. Pressing the button again while in the air will trigger your reverse thrusters, which will cause you to shoot back downward very quickly, as opposed to drifting down. The X button, finally, is what triggers your cloaking device. A small meter under your damage gauge dictates how much you can use it, though it recharges quite quickly when not in use. The visual effect accompanying the cloak is a Predator-style transparent distortion, which is quite pleasing to the eye. Cloaking seems to be pretty effective on the AI bots we fought, though it was pretty easy to spot them cloaked, especially when they were nearby. We'll have to see it in use by live opponents before we can get totally excited about it.

The game's looks, though, are quite easy to fawn over. Everything is high-poly, the textures are superclear, and the frame rate is nice and smooth--it's sitting somewhere around 30 at all times, and it rarely bogs down, even when you're moving around real fast and getting shot at by a bunch of enemies. The junky-looking mech designs are quite cool, and their color schemes are often pretty neat. They look pretty cool in motion too, though some of them are markedly less animate than others. Still, some have pretty intricate movement routines, which make up for those less animate quite effectively. Weapon effects, though, not counting the cloaking effect, are markedly less impressive at this point. They consist mainly of yellow and white particles used for flash around automatic weapons and in the trails of rockets and bombs. It would be in the game's best interest to look a whole lot more explosive, and turning the particle effects up a notch would certainly achieve it. But still, we can't overstate how impressive and full things look at this point; just take a look at the screenshots, and you'll agree.

So we're certainly looking forward to seeing more of this game, and we'll likely get to do so at E3 next month. We're particularly itching to learn about the multiplayer and customization options, not to mention experience the matches firsthand. We'll have more for you as soon as it's available.