TGS '07: Mobile Ops: One Year War Hands-On

If you can say one thing about Japanese gamers, it's that they can't seem to get enough of their Gundam, and publisher Namco Bandai seems to be quite eager to supply owners of next-generation systems with games to support their habit. Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire was a (bad) launch title for the PS3, while a more recent entry melded the Gundam universe with the gameplay of Dynasty Warriors. At TGS 2007, however, Namco Bandai had a new Xbox 360 Gundam game on display, entitled Mobile Suit Gundam: Operation Troy.

Only the multiplayer portion of Troy was available on the show floor, although from what we've seen, it seems as though the game may actually be a multiplayer-focused game. What's interesting is that upon first starting a multiplayer round, you spawn as a normal human soldier instead of appearing inside a Gundam directly. You can actually pick a few different character classes to spawn as, including antitank, normal infantry, and apparently even a medic class, each of which will have different weapons and items.

When you spawn into the world, you're greeted with a third-person interface that'll let you see the world around you. In the deathmatch map that we played on, which took place in an abandoned city that had begun to be destroyed by the ongoing conflict between the EFSF and Zeon forces, we spawned in the hills a short distance outside the city. You're perfectly capable of fighting as a foot soldier, if you wish, and we imagine that some multiplayer modes will probably force you to get used to it. But for the purposes of this map, it was much quicker to get into the action if you hopped into one of the tanks or Gundam suits that were waiting for us near the perimeter of the city.

After hopping into a Gundam suit, the gameplay was tried and true Gundam. We managed to jet toward the enemy forces relatively quickly, took up a position atop a tall building, and started using our "hyper bazooka" to fire on our foes. Although we gave as good as we got, we eventually died, and after respawning, we took a tank out for a spin. Unfortunately this was a bad idea because it was very difficult to control and didn't have any of the shielding of the Gundams, meaning that we were quickly destroyed when spotted by an enemy suit.

All in all, Operation Troy doesn't seem to have a whole lot of new ideas to bring to the table. If you've played any of the recent Battlefield games, then you'll be pretty comfortable with the gameplay here. That said, we only saw one multiplayer game type, so we're willing to bet there's more to the game than what was on the show floor. If Operation Troy winds up coming stateside, you can be sure GameSpot will have more details as they become available.