CRW Metal Jacket is a mecha strategy game set in futuristic Japan. You command a group of well-armed soldiers through a series of missions, from infiltrating a drug lord's mansion to assassinating the leader of a coup. The game proceeds in real-time, but you can pause the action at any time to give orders for your soldiers to move or attack. Your units can pilot one of three specialized mechs: Attacker, Defender, or Sniper, and your squad leader Reiko has an exclusive Commander mech. Each mech has a special move in addition to attacking or defending, such as the Defender's Search, which reveals a small area of the map from the fog of war. After each mission, all of your surviving soldiers earn bonus points, which can be distributed among their stats. If you fail a mission, you proceed to the next, but receive no bonus points, making all future missions harder. The game was released in Japan on the PC-98, then localized for China and Korea on DOS. The game was remade for the PlayStation two years later as the similarly-named CRW: Counter Rebellion War, with controls adapted to the game pad and four additional missions.
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Unfortunately, as much as this game looks more or less like my platonic ideal of a video game (my wife wandered over at one point and said, "this is the most Leah looking game I've ever seen") it feels dreadful to play. I can't help but wonder why on Earth they didn't make it turn based, especially because the second one is.
All in all, it's a game that looks great (no surprise) but is rough to play in 2024
Review:
Super nice art and when you first open it up it feels like you are entering an old machine from a dystopian future. A lot of this feeling is thanks to the hud art, it looks similar to something like Gundam but it really got its own style. The game takes some time to get into but when you understand everything it is actually very rewarding.
The combats really feel like you are controlling big mechas and you can really feel the effort they have put in to make it feel like every move has its own consequences. But the mechanics are almost a little too slow and you can really feel that it was a little too early for its time
upon release, it also got this cool anime PSX intro: https://youtu.be/w-kMBeYW0Dg