"BLARGH!" Will be your battlecry when you play this game.
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Ok so the Macross era is when Battlecry takes place. This saga is a sub-series in the Robotech story arch. Too avoid spoilers and long boring plot summaries, basically humans are fighting Zentraedi aliens using super cool sexy mechas. These giant (usually like the size of a city building) biped robots can usually transform into vehicles, planes mostly. They pack serious firepower, can walk on the ground, can hover and are capable of amazing mid-air agile maneuvers. That is of course in the shows.
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You don't play Battlecry, you "try" to play it. It's an action/shooter played from a 3rd person viewpoint but for everything it does right there is 2 things holding it back. The controls are decent for the most part, but it's the games feedback that kills it. The game just feels empty and half done at time. The one saving grace is the transform aspect. This allows your mecha to go from plane, biped and planiped*. I'm serious; like I said earlier the mechas can transform between biped and plane, then there is an additional mode right in between them.
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The former is simply a plane, this is to be used in large-scale airborne battles naturally and actually isn't that bad to control and play as. Turning around and changing your yaw and whatnot is pretty smooth for the most part, but the dogfights stink like a skunks' behind. It boils down to you cruising around waiting for a target to pop up on your screen, then you blurp out a ton of missiles (which really look just like white lines) that automatically home in on it. Your machine gun as a plane is pointless and actually chasing down opponents is far too difficult. But you do have 2 options when using missiles. You can either blast them all out at the one target or shoot small clusters at multiple targets. Doing either one is actually not a bad idea, plus it's kind of cool to see like 20 white lines go flying out of your aircraft in various vectors and velocities to dish out some punishment. Your mechas missiles recharge after time, it's kind of like reloading missiles... yeah it's weird.
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Your mecha in biped mode moves as if it was swimming in molasses and can turn around as fast as an eighteen-wheeler truck can do a drift. The biped isn't unplayable, but it's boring and banal to play. Your mecha can't strafe very well and it can't orientate itself correctly either at time. Plus it has no quick dodge move and it takes too much time to build up momentum. So you can't jump into a crowd of enemies and toast them all, nor can you nimbly avoid missiles like the pilots do in the show. Playing in biped mode is ok once you can learn the controls and the little nuances that plague the mode, plus it actually is the best mode for CQC fighting in urban areas. But the machine gun, which will become the main weapon as a biped has one annoying feature. While it doesn't have to be reloaded it has a cool down time if shot too much repeatedly. Unfortunately it takes only a few bursts to reach the half waypoint on the heat meter so you can't go Rambo style on it. You have to shoot little bursts to control the cool down. While the cool down doesn't take too long to diminish, it can be extremely annoying, at least it has infinite ammo. Another aggravating thing about biped form is the boosting; boosting in plane form works well but in biped form it is confusing. The jets in your mechas feet will allow you to move faster but this just complicates things more as regular normal speed movement is already hard enough. Doing hovering maneuvers is irritating also. While hovering it is impossible to aim, shoot, move and dodge, one just doesn't have enough fingers.
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Planiped form blends both plane and biped form… what a surprise, but it's not really effective in either ground combat or aerial fighting. In the air it is more like turning into a stationary turret than actually a swift machine of death, it's far too disorientating to move as planiped in the air. On the ground you move awkwardly. You will find yourself slamming into walls and losing control; Planiped form is just a hassle.
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Battlecry does look and sound decent though. It has a cel-shaded cartoony look, which actually is pretty slick at times. However, some particle effects and explosions look really poor. Plus the city environments are recycled throughout the whole game. Some of the voice actors return for their original roles and they do a good job, the music is good but forgettable. Also Battlecry has a mediocre amount of content. There are some unlockable goodies here and there, but the relatively short campaign just doesn't spice things up. There is a little mission variety and the baddies do change appearance overtime. Plus there are different mechas to choose from although it's hard to tell the performance difference and you can customize the paint job on it. In addition a weaksauce 1 on 1 local multiplayer mode is present as well, this isn't appealing though, you and you're friend or sibling or dog should just go have a thumb war or two.
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Despite the fact it had giant transforming vehicular machines, tons of cool characters and locales and a sweet history of aggravating American TV critics… Robotech: Battlecry is a waste. If you're a huge Robotech fanatic then get it for any price less than 10 bucks, just so you can have it in your collection.
* I made up my own names for the 3 modes; Fighter, Guardian and Battroid are the names for plane, planiped and biped respectively. Yes I know I used some incorrect terminology; I like to call the robots in Robotech "mechas" instead of the real name "veritechs" It's a personal preference.
Traditional 5 category scoring
Gameplay- 6
Graphics- 7
Sound- 7
Value- 6
Tilt- 5
~ 5.9