REVIEW: Custom Mech Wars


Title	Custom Mech Wars
Developer	D3 Publisher
Publisher	D3 Publisher
Release Date	December 14th, 2023
Genre	Action
Platform	PlayStation 5, Steam
Age Rating	Teen
Official Website

When I first saw Custom Mech Wars, I thought it looked like a lot of fun. It reminded me of Earth Defense Force with huge robots that you should be able to customize in any way you can imagine. I finally got a chance to sit down and play through the 40 mission campaign, and now I want to share my thoughts. Was this the fun and crazy mech game I’d been waiting for, or did it just fizzle out from the start? Let’s find out!

The story takes place in a time when an enormous comet is approaching Earth. While the comet will not collide with our planet, it will cause major changes to our environment through changes to our sun and gravity. There will be large seismic, volcanic, and electromagnetic events that will be catastrophic to our way of life. Many areas are evacuated, and AI-controlled robots are left to patrol these areas. You are part of the Four-Seven Security Service. This group provides some services in the abandoned areas, such as crime prevention, repair, and putting out the volcanic fires. You soon learn many of the G-Mechs working the area are controlled by an AI that has gone haywire, and it is your task to suppress these rogue units.

Graphically, Custom Mech Wars looks pretty good. The mechs have a lot of details, and there are tons of parts you can use to build these units any way you like. There are several heads, arms, legs, torsos and dozens of different weapons you can use to load out these beasts for combat. The enemy units do not differ from the ones you can build yourself, but the AI seems to have access to many parts you cannot use yourself at that time. The environments are nicely detailed as well, there are empty fields, abandoned cities, airfields, and more. The PC port doesn’t have 1440p resolution for some odd reason, but the game ran at 140 FPS on my 3060 at 1080p, so I’m guessing you could do 4K at around a solid 60 with the same card.

In the sound department, I’d have to call this one pretty basic. There are a few music tracks that play while you’re blasting your foes to pieces. These are not terrible, but nothing really stands out about them either. There are opening and ending theme songs that are nicely done, but the rest of this OST is pretty bland. The sound effects are decent and get the job done. Many different sounds, from the guns firing and G-Mechs being blasted to pieces, fit the game well and add to the overall experience. The game has voice acting that tells the story through communications during the missions. These actors do a decent job here, but this story is so basic, there isn’t much they could do to add any flavor to it.

Gameplay here is pretty much what you would expect from D3 Publisher making a game like EDF with mechs. You will take on dozens of mechs during each of the campaign missions, unlocking new parts to build better weapons and machines along the way. This all seems good in theory, since just like with other titles, you will gain better parts for completing the missions on higher difficulties. But here, it just seems like they never give you enough parts to build anything cool. I did all the story missions on normal, and there are many different mechs in various sizes, that I didn’t have nearly enough parts to complete. While I get you don’t want players to be overpowered, in a game where the selling point was, “look at all the cool mechs you can make,” having the parts available to the player to create things should’ve been priority one. They have improved things a bit through the patches that have been released since launch, but I still feel like this could be a lot better.

When you finally get some parts unlocked, building the mechs is a ton of fun. You can attach various parts to several points along each torso, arm, leg, and various other parts. These include more arms or legs, crazy accessories, or some good old fashioned firepower to blast your foes away. These include several auto guns, melee weapons, rocket launchers, lasers, shotguns, machine guns, and many more instruments of destruction. I had a lot of fun just seeing what sorta crazy creations I could come up with and painting them various colors. You can even edit their deployment animations for an extra touch.

Custom Mech Wars isn’t really a bad game, but it gets wrong the one thing that makes it really shine by not letting players have access to the parts fast enough. It’s really fun to create some crazy mech and just go out there and blast all your foes to bits during the missions, but when you have to use the same ones for most of the game because you don’t have enough parts to make what you really want, it gets a little frustrating. I’d have a hard time recommending this one at the full $49.99 price tag, but if you catch it on sale, there is some fun to be had here. It took me around 13 hours to beat all of the missions on normal mode, and you could put a ton more in if you wanted to grind out all the parts to make the really cool mechs. Hopefully, they continue to patch the game a bit more and allow players access to more fun stuff to build their crazy creations with sooner.