Extremely fun multiplayer, almost cartoonish yet spectacular graphics, easy controls, a lot of playable 'Mechs = great
MechAssault offers smooth graphics and vibrant visuals almost so vibrant it seems sometimes kinda cartoonish. And while I do count this down as a con, the pro's outnumber the bad's relatively by far...
And yet, truly, I rate this game on my opinion of its replay value..which is A LOT. The offline multiplayer never seems to get tedious, for you're always trying to obtain the most 'kills' without dying, particularly in the River City map of the Grinder mode. Joining with a friend on the same Xbox is always fun, too, either in competition or cooperation. The destructive buildings and bridges make it more fun, just for the hell of it.
However, the single-player campaign seems to lack greatly. The storyline and voice acting is sometimes silly, despite the only true cinematic scene being the introduction. Nevertheless, the plot is fairly streamlined and while the gameplay is off-and-on it quickly gets redundant. The difficulty was also an issue for me--not that it was hard, but that if you die the respawn/restart points seemed ridiculously spaced apart.
The last thing that MechAssault lacked was the ability to fight battled via a sort of 'FPS' view, from within the cockpit of your 'Mech. This certainly toned-down the uniqueness of MechWarrior, but ultimately the motility and nice appearances of your 'Mech seem much better if done in a 3rd-person vantage. The last good thing, notably to me, were the simple controls. Pull this trigger and scroll through your weapons; pull this trigger to shoot them. The very interesting thing IMO too were the weapon-upgrades you could merely walk over to obtain, thus enhancing a particular weapon of yours. Sure, you cannot customize you 'Mech anymore--and in multiplayer only the color--but I think it's a nice swap for the rudimentary control system.
Ultimately MechAssault delivers, primarily in multiplayer though.