An elaboration of Masaya's Assault Suit Leynos via thesis: Mid-crisis mech military cinemacy, now taken form as a Strategy RPG. Depth starts somewhat shallow, slowly matures into a highly-intricate behemoth, then fails to stick the landing with a borderline game-killing victory lap.

As a mech tactics game, your squad (and the opponent's) are outfitted with extremely long-range options right out the gate, with little inhibitions. In most other SRPG's, this would create a severe imbalance, so Vixen compromises by making all units extremely tanky - most enemies take 8 shots to go down, and your own team can burden anywhere from 10 to 30 depending on the scenario. Taking out enemies effectively is a matter of dogpiling on them one at a time in a grand war of attrition. But within a couple missions, your squad is joined by reliable ol' Ben and his aerial battleship. Ben's range is even more absurd than your ground squad's, his movement's unaffected by terrain rules, and his health is monstrous. But most important: He can carry your own units and let them refuel/heal. This starts a spiral of balancing aggressive play while keeping Ben in range to stock up on healing opportunities, like a portable home base - a huddle-like system that expands further when Chay & Nina join with their shield-generating Panacea. It's also worth noting pilots and mechs are selected independently from the disembarking menu. This opens up a huge swathe of technical options: Mixing pilots into mechs that comfortably match their stats, sending pilots out in bad stat matchups as a means to grind EXP, but most importantly, returning a mech to the battleship and tagging in another pilot with it so you can double-attack. When the game gives you proximity missles around the second half, pulling this tandem move is a risky but game-changing maneuver. Vixen is fantastic at taking these simple-but-deep mechanics and slowly introducing new vectors of challenge for you to overcome with them.

That is, until the last few missions - the back five against the big bad and his quartet of right-hands are all noticeably difficult, but mission 14 is a signal of infamy. It's a surprise attack mission - and the enemy does the surprise attacking. Not only do they outnumber you and get full coverage of the map when they appear, but their ambush happens on their turn, meaning they're guaranteed a better start. This mission is borderline impossible - if you give the team even one weak unit to gang up on, they will. I would've finished this game a month or so ago, but this single mission pushed me away from it for so long, and I only beat it today by save-scumming through - constantly checking the enemy AI for which unit they were going to target, treating the load/save toggle like a simulation of guerilla horrors until I figured out a perfect plan of action.

What's more demoralizing though is how the game totally drops the ball after that; the last mission isn't even somewhat hard, just a slog. The final boss holes himself up in a corner of the room, using MP to throw screen nukes and full heals around willy-nilly. Take about 25 turns of shooting him and he'll eventually run out of ammo. I nearly shit myself when you beat him and they fake you into thinking he has a second phase, I was close to losing it.

Had this game ended better, it could be one of my new favorite Genesis games. In its current state though, it's not super recommendable, and even though I'd love to play it again, I'd probably stop once things get hairy. A shame; it deserves to be seen as one of many other SPRG classics on Genesis, up there with Lord Monarch and Shining Force.

Super Fighter Team got close to a commercial translation of this a while ago, but it got cancelled out of the blue. Masaya's been working with Ratalaika a lot since then; I'd love a port to modern platforms with some difficulty tweaks and emulation furnishing, just like their Gleylancer port.

In a world where western AAA developers are so utterly risk-averse that they'd make Courage the Cowardly Dog look like The 300, and many indie developers are still infatuated with roguelikes, Soulslikes, and "Quirky Earthbound-Inspired RPG Maker Games About Mental Health" , I have nothing but respect for Steel Assault's devotion to the pure arcade style of gaming.

Of course, I'm being quite hyperbolic (and a bit unfair) here, but I really am glad a title like this exists. Steel Assault is a short, but very sweet run-and-gun with heavy arcade influence, reminiscent of Contra or Metal Slug. The controls are tight, the level and enemy design is both varied and spectacular, and boss fights are equally well-crafted. The game is satisfyingly hard (especially on Expert and Arcade), and never unfair. The spritework is a beautiful sight to behold, and the music is downright amazing, evoking strong Thunder Force vibes.

I'm not without a few grievances with the game, though. My main problem is that the zip-line mechanic felt really underutilized. I was expecting it's uses and applications to evolve more during the game (and it kinda did a few times, like during the conveyor belt part of Stage 3), but it just never wowed me. Similarly, I expected the subweapon mechanic to be a lot more fleshed out. It seems kinda weird to have an entire subweapon bar (that you can refill with melee attacks) only for a single weapon that you rarely get. Personally, I also think that the gap between Normal and Expert mode's difficulty is faaaar too big. Expert mode doubles damage received, increases enemy health, decreases health restoration, AND removes all checkpoints in levels, meaning that you have to restart the stage every time you die. In a game with five different difficulty levels, they really should have been able to smooth it out.

Despite the hiccups, Steel Assault, at its core, is still a great, tightly-designed, and focused game. I can wholeheartedly recommend it, and I do hope that the developers continue to make games and refine their work.

And make sure to completely disregard anyone accusing the game of being too short; that very sentiment of "length = price" has done irreparable damage to the state of gaming. This is very clearly and unabashedly an arcade-style game, and I can guarantee that any issues with length would be solved by playing Expert and Arcade mode.

But I digress; just play Steel Assault.