This game can be super janky at times; you might fly too fast and get stuck inside another ship, you might get trapped in an unwinnable sword-clash loop, or you might bounce off the game entirely when you play the first mission which for some reason feels faster than human eyes can follow. Allied mechs have a weird tendancy to stay in the center of your camera view, so they're constantly in the way when you want to shoot. The English language version has several errors and oddities, likely a rough translation job by the tiny team.

But if you can accept those issues, this is an amazing experience. You just have to give yourself time to adjust. The game speed feels too fast at first, but then you start getting used to it, adjusting the control sensitivity to human levels and setting buttons to something easier.

After a short prologue fight in someone's plot armor mech, there's a rough transition to the main story and you're given the option of three starting mechs. This choice matters a lot! Whether you choose the slow, tough mech or the fast one or go balanced, that's your core and every part you buy afterwards will modify that. The only way to try another core is to start a new save!

Then you're thrown into a mecha-enthusiast dream / gear-shopping nightmare with your own ship base and upgrade spreadsheets and tech research and experience levels and text boxes explaining each new thing. Take it slow, don't be intimidated, the fun is about to begin.

In the Simulator room, there's a few tutorial maps which teach the basics, and you'll be able to replay mission levels here to find research you missed or get extra experience or test your newest mech, plus there are Challenges which you can grind for cash. A tough Survival mode will be your biggest money maker when you've got a better mech, but remember to only reach the target level and then lose because there seems to be a max reward amount you can get each time.

Once you've adjusted the control settings to your liking and played for a few hours, the game comes together as a simple yet satisfying space mecha pilot fantasy. Some missions are rough but they do get better with time and the difference in power between the starter and an upgraded mech is scary fun. There's also a nice variety of mission types: escorting a supply ship along a path, gathering materials while hiding from the nearby sun behind asteroids, sneaking into a base by flying close to a larger ship, laser puzzles, deactivating doomsday weapons, and several boss battles.

The story isn't anything deep or fancy. You are the talented captain of an ace mecha team and your job is to protect the fleet which travels around gathering resources in space. There's a fleet commander who issues orders, support staff who figure things out for you, and your team which sometimes join you in missions. An evil empire is at war with the universe, and you want to defeat them. A couple characters die in over-dramatic scenes of deep anguish, but the war must be won. The sci-fi setting has some neat elements but remains in the background.

Combat on the other hand is great. This is one of the better space flight games I've played recently for battles against large and complex targets, like bases covered in turrets or huge warships. The jetpack-style maneuverability isn't exactly realistic to space, but allows you to smoothly zip around shooting highlighted weak points. As a comparison, Strike Suit Zero attempted this and looked fantastic, but felt bad combining two styles of flight where one wanted to crash into the target while the other was awkward at moving and had a time limit.

Against smaller targets, you become this terrifying deity chewing through health bars in seconds. When most small ships are below half health, you can perform cinematic finishing moves which also heal you quite a lot; you'll want to use the light weapons so they don't explode from one shot, and this becomes a powerful tactic at the higher challenge levels.

You battle opponent mechs from a distance, then move in for flashy sword battles full of special moves, shield blocking, perfect counters, stun chances and sword clashing. These are the only fights that feel fair and equal, yet provide nice breaks from the chaotic space battles.

The gear upgrades screen only looks overwhelming at first. Your mech has four armor components: the head tends to affect your aim, the arms and torso give you light and heavy weapons and missiles, the legs change your speed. Some parts are better for health or energy or speed, and you will have to choose between trade-offs. There's also a sword and a shield which can have special properties, from energy theft or breaking enemy guard, even auto-regeneration.

Some gear can't be purchased until you research certain technologies, which you do by first finding hidden items in the missions, then purchasing the research. You can also buy research that improves your mech directly, or you can research custom mechs with unique designs. The unique mechs are powerful but can't mix and match parts, so once you start using one of them, you can focus on buying research that benefits that mech the most – and then some missions and challenges can't be beaten unless you make the right mix and match mech.

After you beat the main game, there's a New Game Plus mode which upgrades the enemies somewhat. You'll start the same story over with the same core and everything you purchased before, so this is more like a victory lap as well as a great time to try a harder difficulty setting.

Once again, as janky and rough as this game is, that can be forgiven because the amazingly small team made something really fun. The combat tends toward overpowered fantasy at the easier difficulty settings or once you reach higher levels, though there are a few challenge spikes which force you to upgrade. Play this for that power fantasy, not the average story, and you'll have a great time.

As long as you go into this expecting a short game, the experience is an explosive action-packed movie which you replay for higher scores. Like Star Fox 64 without the animals and with missions on huge open space maps in a power-fantasy universe where you have the only awesome transforming mech and everyone else is fodder.

This being the Director's Cut means a few tweaks have been made and also you get the DLC content as part of the package, but not the Infinity version which should have been included. I haven't played any of the others, but I can recommend this one.

We begin in a universe split between two factions: the Earth forces who think they run everything, and the Colonial planets which get treated like an evil empire despite how badly they were wronged in the past while just wanting to be free. The plot keeps saying the Colonials are the bad guys, but I actually prefer the bad ending where they get the last laugh.

You play as an ace Earth pilot who got punished for your mysterious amnesia, so now you're back in flight school and doing chores. But this gets you and another rule-breaker sent to a mysterious facility where an omniscient cyborg gifts you a super-ship that can switch to humanoid mode with the energy from shooting down enemies, ie adrenaline I guess. From there, you fight in a series of battles that eventually lead to saving Earth maybe.

Combat starts in standard fighter-plane mode where you have two primary weapons and some number of secondary weapons. The primaries are an energy rifle where careful aiming is required and you can run out temporarily as the battery recharges, and a machine gun with limited ammo which auto-hits your lock on target in a wide area ahead of you. Use the former against stationary targets and large ships, then the latter on the highly maneuverable small ships. You also unlock a beam laser eventually but it seems to miss a lot.

Secondaries include a broad selection of high-powered rockets and guided missiles; the guidance systems aren't very impressive so I generally used the dumb rockets, or the “Fire and Forgets” which shoot quickly and continue chasing until they hit some target. There's also a few big and slow missiles which can be useful against large targets. Ships often have two or more slots for secondaries, and you can select the same type in both to start with more ammo.

When a transforming ship has enough energy, you can switch to the humanoid mecha Strike mode. You transform, your forward movement stops, you can now dash in any direction using the thrusters, and you can auto-turn toward your next target. Ammo is always infinite for Strike mode and the guns tend to become stronger in some way, so you can simply mash buttons in a burst of hyper-deadly action until the super energy meter runs out.

That feeling of transforming into Strike mode and letting the auto-aim take over as you dart around destroying everything with stronger guns and missile circus spam is what this game exists for. It's amazing the first time and remains pretty good as you keep learning how best to use it, such as first transforming amid many small ships for the short range fast gun, or using another Strike ship's long range to snipe mid-size ships, or deciding between guns or missiles depending on your targets.

There are other tactical choices to be made in the battles, though the tutorial mission didn't do a great job explaining. The target priority system gave me a lot of trouble at first; some missions absolutely require this greater battlefield awareness. What they tell you is that you can select the nearest target, or a target that's in or near your crosshairs.

But before you do that, you should scroll through the target priority groups to decide what to focus on, such as capital ships over small fighter craft, or torpedoes when you need to protect an ally ship, or whatever the mission commander tells you is important. If you set priority to torpedoes and destroy them all, the name is grayed out until more appear and you'll target other stuff, perfect for running them down the moment they get fired.

One minor flaw is the game cannot seem to decide how to mark your targets. Sometimes they use a white circle which turns red when you're in range, and might have a hard-to-see dotted ring to show you should fire from elsewhere because something is in the way. Or they use a white box (which doesn't change color if you are in or out of range) with markings inside that look crossed out (to me they look like “Don't Fire Here” when in fact you should) but those do a really nice thing where they are grayed out if you need to fly around.

Mission medals remain almost completely mysterious to me. Sometimes I would do okay and get the highest medal, and sometimes I would try my hardest and not even get the lowest medal. There are possibly some missions where you can't score well the first time because the next-gen unlockable ships are only available after one success. Mission completion time seems to have the largest factor on the final score, but they don't tell you what's the best time. Restarting a section at a checkpoint will penalize your final time, though at least you get full health and ammo.

The game has 13 main story missions, plus 5 optional “simulator” missions. At the end of each main story mission, you might unlock a new weapon, or a new ship which you can use if you replay a completed mission, or an upgrade for the first Strike ship if you complete side objectives. I liked how the simulator missions actually work as tutorials for advanced tactics, and suggest basic ships and weapons to use which gives you a feel for how tough this war is on the normal pilots. You can choose from Easy to Hard difficulty on any mission, and Normal difficulty was decently challenging.

As for the plot and characters, they're kind of just people who talk at you occasionally and give orders or suggestions of how to win. A few of them have backstories which reveal everything you need to know about the big war going on: “Colonials are the bad guys for wanting freedom, so we committed war crimes to win a battle once, and now they're angry and will do whatever they need to win, so we have to fight desperately to survive.” At least some of the map scenery is cool.

Overall, I had a great time playing this for the gameplay alone. Certain elements were confusing for a while, but they do become clear with time. The story experience left me wanting a more complex and interesting plot where I don't feel I'm fighting on the wrong side, though I prefer having any plot to none. Try this for the epic Strike mode combat!