Metal Fatigue is one of those forgotten early RTS games that besides having interesting mechanics revolved around the mechs, the rest is just a severly lacking.
Not to mention multiple parts of the game is still broken.
Using the tool to change the resolution does nothing, the cutscenes dont play and the music does not play for the correct faction are just some of the issues i experienced when playing the game.
Visually it of course looks dated, the most details are given to the mechs and it does a great job at giving each piece of the mech unique details depending on the type of arm, legs or torso and what faction it is.
But the rest is just "mundane" looking or immensly generic.
The UI is atrocious, and it lacks so many information and details you know from other RTS games, so a lot of times you just don't know what a unit does or what it's good against or what certain buildings do.The actual stats and information you are given, is so tiny and located at the bottom it becomes a pain to figure out what it says a lot of the time.
Gameplay is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ slog, outside of the mechs, everything else absolutely sucks.
vehicles do barely any damage to buildings or mechs and they die so quickly.
Since it is one of those early RTS games, the balance is out the window and you'll be constantly swarmed by enemies and trying to attack their bases becomes an absolute war of attrition.single campaign missions can take over an hour and not because the missions was greatly structured or because there was a back and forth with the enemy.But because nothing does any significant damage to buildings and it takes ages to get anywhere.
AI is severly lacking at times will just stand still when an enemy is attacking them.
Pathfinding is awful, and you will constantly experience units getting stuck on other units or buildings.
Only fun part in the game is when the mechs fight, but the entire game around it, makes it less enjoyable.
There is a gimmick in the game where you have 3 different maps in any given level, surface, underground and air.
The surface is the traditional rts as you know, and there is not really anything more to it.
The air has you build on asteriods scattered around the map, and only the builders can move around the place, the rest is only for planes, which there are 2 of, bombers and fighter planes.
Your units can be transported to an asteriod using a teleporter, but can't traverse between asteriods, the air map becomes uinteresting quickly.
Underground is the worst of the 3. But the premise or idea is interesting, to get underground you need to have a driller vehicle, that can build an elevator, thus gaining access to the underground, it can then drill the walls underground, to expand the area you can move around in, which is quite interesting.
However for both maps outside of the surface, you can't use mechs, so you rely on the vehicle and planes, as mentioned, everything outside mechs sucks in combat and the slog that you already had becomes 10 times as tedious now.
I could not care less about the story, it had an interesting setup, but the only tidbits of story you get, is narration before and after missions.
Sounds are whatever, they sound outdated, but passable for a game from that time period.
Music is okay, but generic and apparently still does not play the correct faction music.
It feels like the idea of the mechs was added first to the game and then everything else was then lazily added later.
Play Supreme commander instead or hell, even Iron Harvest is better than this.
