Is there anything more enjoyable and surreal than playing as cute versions of giant robots fighting a bloody war? Depends on if you’re a Gundam fan.
Bandai and OGPlanet are bringing out a new MMO game based on Sunrise’s popular Gundam franchise, and it’s not the typical game we often seen as MMOs. The game draws on all the popular mechs for you to play in various third-person shooter missions in either single or multiplayer modes. Using a free-to-play model, you can pick up from over 350 different robots. Getting your robots is done in three methods: you can use in-game points earned from missions to get them randomly from the capsule machine, you can pay actual money in order to get random, or if you desperately want that specific one, you can complete specific missions to earn them.
You can collect over 300 robot units
Once you have your units, you can customize them with different color schemes and insignias, although your ideas can be limited by what type of unit you’re customizing and what series it’s from. If you get tired of having a certain unit (or you just got tons of copies from the capsule machine) you can scrap it for points. You can also use an established blueprint to design your own mech.
The sheer choice of robots from the franchise’s long history makes for quite a list of robots to master. While the basic controls are the same for all units, with a melee attack, strong long-range attack, weak long-range attack and super attack, each robot has its own strength and weaknesses, utilizing a rock-paper-scissors system. What this means is that rock is close-range type units, paper is long-range, and scissors are in the mid-range. The most fun that a fan will have is choosing from robots like Shining Gundam, Wing Zero Gundam and the iconic grunt mech Zaku from the original series.
Play as classic mobile suits like the Nu Gundam
Possibly the most major issue for this game is the fact that you’d need to be a Gundam fan to truly enjoy it. That said, it’s still a good game for an MMO, and it’s nice to have something different for online play.
SD Gundam Capsule Fighter Online is due out in December of 2011.
