A giant robot Player versus player game? sounds like fun!
Story N/A-
from what i can gather your a mercenary hired to do what you do best, shoot and/or slice and dice the opposition us to pieces. Thats about it, no real story to speak of past this so this gets a pass on the rating
Gameplay-6/10
You start with a great toutorial that shows you the basics of moving, using your booster, and using weapons. Its quick and easy to follow each step. after that your given a advanced toutorial were you get to use all the different weapons and get a fell for which you like. After finishing this your given some decent amount of cash and a viriaty of weapons, and then are left free to do what you want.
Once free your given a few choices. One is to continue to practice, which is just a few robots standing still and you can practices some combos on thse stationary targets.
Another option is a hanger that you can fix up your robot with different gears and weapons you buy in the store, this is self explanatory.
Beyond that your also given a pilot info tab to see how good you've done in each style of combat, what level you are, what level you have your weapons at and so on.
Now once you decide to go and play the game you have a few choices on game types. You have the standard capture the flag and death match/team death match. You also have a territory control game, were its just as the title says, you capture territory and move on. And also the final aspect of the game is a sort of player versus enemy game were you have to defend different points of territory from enemy zergs.
Once you chose which game play you want it gets weird trying to figure out which weapons work best for what you wanna do. More so, you have to contend that every so often the weapons you use, even the melee ones, overheat. That means running up to some one guns blazing and you are then forced to switch weapons which leaves you just plain vulnerable to attack and you must try to survive while being shot in the face and trying to reload your weapons.
Even worse is some weapons have a dead zone on them. Now i can understand being out of range of someone, but if someone is in your face swinging at you with a melee weapon and you have a rifle or a cannon and have them squarely in front of you, you cant hit them at all, and you cant lock on to them in a close range. which makes it absurd that you can carry a cannon and cant fire at someone 5 feet in front of you thats stand in front of you and just swinging/shooting like crazy.
Another problem with the weapon system is the enormous amount of lag you have to contend with. No this isn't just a personal problem, the whole community has a problem with this. Even the game spot Exteel forums have expressed problems with it for the non believers. This becomes a pain for those that are trying to melee someone down, what you may see is someone in front of you, but they are actually a good chunk of yards away from you. and the same could be said about running from someone and being clearly out of range yet still being damaged and then being killed. Lag is an insanely large issue with the game.
Aside from the bad parts of this, the game play is rather fun. You can instantly jump into the game and shot away at your pleasure, it wont try to give you mindlessly annoying quest to go talk to x person then run miles back to talk to y person. Making money is easy, after every match you are ranked on number of kills/deaths and how much time you have played the match for. Depending on your placement you are given credits that allow you to buy parts. The major downside is your can have 50 kills more than someone, however if they were in the match longer than you then they will be placed higher than you, which is just another absurd aspect of this game.
After each match you are also given experience points that allow you to level, and experience points twords weapons that you used to make you better with the weapons you use the most. How ever the weapon exp takes and unnecessarily longer amount than it does to just level your self. After each normal level you gain you are given points to spend to either improve hit points, energy, speed, and so on. also with each level you can play in higher brackets such as going from playing in the level 1-4 death matches to 1-9 death matches. the points are kinda worthless, since raising your hit points by 10 still leaves you with around the same amount, and it dose not give enough of an increase to matter. Seems like they just threw it in as a form to keep the lower levels and higher levels separated.
Sound-6/10
Nothing more satisfying then hearing the sounds of things exploding and knowing you did it. However the weapons sound totally fine, but as for the game music it self its pretty forget full. The lobby music and the team room music are the only things that you really ever hear, and even at that they are overly dramatic.
Graphics/scenery-8/10
For a free to play game ill give this game credit for having great graphics. Its easy on a normal computer, and the robots and guns are pretty well detailed. The explosions are underdone, but the customized robots are fun to see as different combinations of parts seem to go together well. Its fun to go into a battle and look above you to see a giant space ship firing down upon another planet, or seeing a dog fight right above you.
However the only over baring part is the ingame advertisement for other NCsoft games on buildings. You cant look at another building without a dungeon runners, or tabula rasa poster covering an entire side of it. Advertisements are all over this game.
Community-7/10
This game has a decent amount of people, and its never hard to find a game of your liking. However like ANY other game, you have the occasional jerk who ruins the fun. This game is pretty easy to enjoy, and little to no down time on waiting on matches to form.
overall-6.5/10
Although its easy to pick up and play, some major technical issues hold it back. Coupled along with huge and ever present in game advertisement, This game has major frustrating patches. However if you can get past this you can have some good fun for a while and enjoy some robot on robot fights. However without a few fixes and tweaks, this game fails to live up to what it could have been.