The following is an excerpt from my list Errant Thoughts on Games I've Never Played Before/Haven't Played Too Much
Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor is perhaps the most fascinating game to have ever used motion controls, and it's also probably the most frustrating. I genuinely wish this were good. If you want a good portrait of how much the original Steel Battalion's core conceit bottlenecked it, its Backloggd page has it on at least seventy lists, but only six people have ever written reviews for it (at the time of writing). This might have to do with the fact that its current price range is currently sitting just above three hundred dollars USD. As Backloggd user Lapbunny helpfully points out, its lack of accessibility and uniqueness has made it practically a mainstay of many expos and conventions, so it's likely that there is an audience for it that just has never been able to own a copy of the game and its controller, themselves.
All this is to say that Heavy Armor was too early for the party. For all intents and purposes, this is a VR game that was made for technology great at emulating mobile games but was mixed with just about anything else. And I have to say, VR is the way to go for a game like this. The peripheral era of gaming is over, long dead, there are piss stains on its tombstone, and game companies are wise to that fact. The best thing that can be done now is to emulate what those peripherals could do without wasting space, and I don't think there's any other format more suited to that than VR.
About the saddest thing to be gleaned from the failure of a game like Heavy Armor is that, regardless of whether or not it can feasibly done now, there must not be any motivation for anyone with a budget to try it again. Steel Battalion isn't a franchise, and it probably wouldn't sell like one, either. If your main goal is to move units so you can keep making games, it's not something you would take another shot at. But somewhere inside me, I have hope. The indie scene is where a game like Steel Battalion will flourish again, as it has done for Guitar Hero quite recently. Godspeed, indie developers, godspeed.
Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor is perhaps the most fascinating game to have ever used motion controls, and it's also probably the most frustrating. I genuinely wish this were good. If you want a good portrait of how much the original Steel Battalion's core conceit bottlenecked it, its Backloggd page has it on at least seventy lists, but only six people have ever written reviews for it (at the time of writing). This might have to do with the fact that its current price range is currently sitting just above three hundred dollars USD. As Backloggd user Lapbunny helpfully points out, its lack of accessibility and uniqueness has made it practically a mainstay of many expos and conventions, so it's likely that there is an audience for it that just has never been able to own a copy of the game and its controller, themselves.
All this is to say that Heavy Armor was too early for the party. For all intents and purposes, this is a VR game that was made for technology great at emulating mobile games but was mixed with just about anything else. And I have to say, VR is the way to go for a game like this. The peripheral era of gaming is over, long dead, there are piss stains on its tombstone, and game companies are wise to that fact. The best thing that can be done now is to emulate what those peripherals could do without wasting space, and I don't think there's any other format more suited to that than VR.
About the saddest thing to be gleaned from the failure of a game like Heavy Armor is that, regardless of whether or not it can feasibly done now, there must not be any motivation for anyone with a budget to try it again. Steel Battalion isn't a franchise, and it probably wouldn't sell like one, either. If your main goal is to move units so you can keep making games, it's not something you would take another shot at. But somewhere inside me, I have hope. The indie scene is where a game like Steel Battalion will flourish again, as it has done for Guitar Hero quite recently. Godspeed, indie developers, godspeed.