Despite the anime influence leading to a bizarre, clashing visual style, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division is a very impressive game for its time. You can see a lot of the stuff Monolith did so well in FEAR already present in this game, the military sci-fi world and enemy design, the focus on dynamic shootouts full of gore, smoke, and debris, even the level design and the pace of the narrative feel very similar to Monolith's later work. The story is unintelligible gibberish that feels more like someone's half-remembered retelling of a lesser 90s mecha show they watched in English years ago than the actual mecha series the game was influenced by, like Appleseed or Patlabor (although FEAR's story wasn't much to write home about either). The critical hit system makes combat unbearable unless you quicksave after every encounter (maybe this is better on lower difficulties?). Still, the novelty of the game and its short duration make it worth playing regardless. I think this is most apparent in the character portraits, which don't really look like actual anime art but are too obviously inspired by it to pass for regular Western game characters. It's very emblematic of turn-of-the-century anime/manga "inspired" Western art in general, think Megatokyo or the Dirty Pair comic adaptation by Adam Warren. I'm not going to pretend that it's a good aesthetic, or that anyone should have any sort of nostalgia for that "era", so to speak (there are some days where I prefer the colored version of Akira to the original, but I think that's different), but it does make Shogo stand out among similar early FPS games. There are plenty of anime-inspired games now, but none of them are quite like Shogo. It's the gameplay that ultimately brings it down, even beyond the endless instakills the game starts to feel like a half-baked prototype for FEAR more than its own thing. The decent effects and weak AI pale in comparison to what that game offers, and the overreliance on levels set in offices and facilities where you are separated from your mech makes the difference in quality between the two games that much more obvious. Again, Shogo is a short experience and it is worth checking out for the novelty alone. If you've never played FEAR you probably won't be bothered at all. But then again, if you've never played FEAR, you should really just play FEAR.





and if you do play Shogo, make sure you don't skip the end credits.