n a desperate bid for a new life, a group of colonists flee the war-torn Earth and establish a new home on a distant world. This being a video game, an invasion by Earth forces destroys the colonists' hopes for peace. As the tide of battle turns against them, the colonists' generals decide to unleash their last hope: the Gunmetal program. The spawn of the project is a giant Havoc robot that transforms into a speedy Havoc jet fighter. The player takes command of the transforming robot and must use it first to repel the invasion and then to carry the battle to the Earthlings.
There is no slow buildup in Gunmetal. The hangar doors open and the robot charges forth to battle a wave of tanks. When the tanks are dead, the player changes to the jet form and flies off to do aerial battle with a squadron of Earth jets. And then it is off to the next level, where the weapons are reloaded and the armor is repaired and it is time to fight again. Every few missions a new weapon is introduced, so that by the end, there are more weapons available that the robot can mount, so the player must chose which one to bring to the scenario.
The Havoc jet is much faster and can—obviously—fly. The Havoc robot is more heavily armored and also has a force shield that makes it less vulnerable to enemy attack. There are reload and re-energize stations around most maps, where the player can re-equip after the vehicle has taken (and dished out) a beating.
Arcade-style action
Gunmetal is not a complicated game. There is no production phase or resources to manage or puzzles to solve or non-player characters with whom to interact. Gunmetal is about killing lots of things while stomping about the fragile countryside in a giant robot. It has the feel of an arcade shooter, one of the side-scrolling ones where the enemy comes at you in wave after wave, because there is no real setup and no story told in cutscenes. Instead, there is mission after mission until the war is won.
What also gives Gunmetal its arcade feel is the fact that there are no difficulty settings and there is no saving the game in the middle of a level. If the players fail at a mission, they can try it again and again until they beat it, but the game doesn't make it any easier. It is up to the players to improve their play. Often, getting a mission right consists of deciding which weapons to load onto the robot and then deploying them against the right enemies at the right time and from the right range. Overall, this lack of options feels odd in a console game. Making players replay doesn't earn more quarters for the game, and the Xbox certainly has the power to accommodate more gameplay variables.
A big thing in the game's favor is that while there is a learning curve to getting each mission correct, the game itself is easy to learn. The default controller setup gives a different way of maneuvering the robot vs. maneuvering the jet, but setup number three makes it the same. A single
button converts from robot to jet, just as a single button changes the weapon, and each trigger fires a distinct kind of round. There are no button combinations to learn. Gunmetal is just about finding the right tool for each job.
I love giant robots, and Gunmetal is the easiest, least complicated giant-robot game I've ever played. It is almost too simple; more gameplay options and more story would have greatly improved it.
— Eric
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