Phantom Crash Preview
Genki and Phantagram are making giant robots fight. Read all about it.
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.
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