Having completed the playable demo available via Steam, here a few of my first impressions for the upcoming indie mecha game Dual Gear.

No bugs encountered, just a few rough edges. As expected. Game play was pretty intuitive, and I didn’t really need to bother with the tutorial at all. Battle system is a real time, strategy/turn based hybrid with movement based auto counter attacking. So positioning will be key. AI is pitifully stupid right now. You can avoid most damage by using terrain as cover. The AI will attack you as if you’re out in the open. Graphics are pleasing, clean. Needs some refining, as I am seeing a lot of jagged edges even with all settings maxed on 1080p. Speaking of. The game doesn’t appear to be a graphical power house but it was really working my GTX970. Even experiencing some odd surges in power needed. In spite of this, it still ran above 60 frames per-second without issue.

The UI could use a bit of work. Just to make things a tad clearer. The info it displayed felt muddy, not obvious as to what it was telling me. The mecha featured were well designed aesthetically, and made me quite eager to see what the customization will add to that. The combat was fun to engage in. The missiles and long range cannon were really fun to use, and made short work of enemies. Melee was confusing at first. Looks like it’s a timing based attack(at least with the sword). The blowing off of limbs is fun to watch as well. You can free aim weapons, but it didn’t appear to me that you could specifically target areas of the body. As long as your reticule was on the enemy, you just fired center mass.

This demo was simply fun. It really does remind me of games such as Front Mission, Armored Core, and a bit of Sakura Taisen

Now, you must keep in mind. All of this is Pre-Alpha. So a it is very early build of the game we’re seeing here, all of this then is subject to change. Although it’s already shaping up to be a great new mecha intellectual property.