I like robots–especially comically large ones armed with various weapons. When I received an invitation to visit Amazing Seasun Games’ Irvine, California office to try out their latest title, Mecha Break, all I really knew going into it was that I’d be playing a game featuring really big robots armed with various weapons. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting (other than access to the aforementioned giant robots), but I certainly wasn’t expecting to fall in love.
Most of Amazing Seasun Games’ previous titles were unknown to me, and all I’d seen of Mecha Break were some impressive trailers. When I finally sat down to take the free-to-play mech-based third-person hero shooter for a test-fly, I was admittedly a bit apprehensive. The live-service hero shooter market is oversaturated enough as it is, and it’s a tough genre to stand out in. Is Mecha Break up to the task? So far, the answer appears to be “yes.”
The game features a cast of 13 different mechs–referred to in-game as Strikers–each with their own set of unique weapons and abilities. When selecting a Striker, players can look at a graph showing that particular mech’s strengths and weaknesses. Some Strikers are great for lone-wolf playstyles, some are better at supporting or defending one’s team, and some are a combination of both. Each Striker feels surprisingly well-balanced–while I quickly fell in love with a specific Striker that fit my preferred playstyle (more on that in a bit), I never felt that one Striker was too overpowered or underpowered.
But before I get into the nitty gritty of Mecha Break’s gameplay, I have to take a second to praise the game’s absolutely phenomenal character creator. Before you set foot in a mech, you must first create the character who will be piloting it. You can pick from a series of masculine and feminine preset characters, but those options can then be customized. At most, I was expecting a simple customization screen that might let me choose from a handful of hairstyles and colors. What I was not expecting was a character creator so detailed it rivals that of RPGs like Cyberpunk 2077. While there aren’t many body shapes to choose from, the sky’s the limit when it comes to everything else.
Players can customize their pilot’s hair color (including roots and tips), every part of their eyes (from sclera to pupil) and other facial features, their makeup (including eyeshadow, eyeliner, blush, lipstick, and lip gloss), scars and tattoos, and more. Outfit colors can also be customized on an extremely detailed level, and players are given the ability to choose from a wide variety of colors. I had to physically tear myself away from the character creator–one could easily spend an hour or more perfecting their pilot’s look. In the end, I had a female pilot with heart-shaped pupils, impeccable makeup, and beautifully animated waist-length hair with a black-to-purple ombré dye job. While playing, I encountered pilots with equally varied looks, including one who was wearing a sailor uniform and had a PC monitor for a head. (I later learned this pilot belonged to none other than Amazing Seasun Games CEO and Mecha Break Game Director, Kris Kwok, who joined us for a few matches.)
Additional customization options like clothing colors, hairstyles, tattoos, and eyeliner designs can be purchased using an in-game currency that you earn for free while playing the game, which is a plus. After just a few hours, I had more than enough currency to customize every inch of my pilot ten times over. While items like pilot outfits will likely be sold via an in-game store when the game is released, the build I played allowed for plenty of customization without the need for players to spend real-life currency. Oh, and players can also customize their Striker as well as its pilot, using the same in-game currency.
After reluctantly dragging myself away from the incredibly detailed character creator, I climbed into a Striker and tried out three game modes. The first was your standard 3v3 team deathmatch-style mode. The second was a 6v6 mode that really leaned into hero shooter mechanics, with different maps having different objectives–one map had my squad protecting a moving payload from an enemy team as it traveled across the map, while another saw us fighting to control a series of three map points in a king-of-the-hill-style match. The third mode, called Mashmak, is Mecha Break’s “signature mode,” according to its developers.
Mashmak is a PvPvE mode that sees 10 three-player teams dropped into an absolutely enormous map, where they must defeat both AI-controlled enemies and player-controlled squads, collect loot, and–if they want to keep that loot–reach an extraction point. The extraction point appears 10 minutes in, but you don’t have to hit it immediately, as another extraction point will spawn every five minutes for the remainder of the match. But you don’t want to wait too long–after 15 minutes, a Pulse Storm will begin devouring the map. You can delay this to some degree by destroying some of the drones controlling the storm, but ultimately, the appearance of the Pulse Storm is your sign that it’s time to extract as soon as possible.
In addition to being visually appealing, Mecha Break’s Mashmak maps are absolutely enormous. Each of the game’s Strikers has the ability to fly long distances (though some have bigger fuel reserves than others), and during the preview event, we were told that even if the Strikers had infinite fuel reserves, it would still take roughly 10 minutes to fly from one end of the map to the other. Mecha Break’s maps aren’t just wide, however–they also have a huge amount of verticality. Players can fly up and over the side of large mountains which, in most games, are usually put there to keep players penned in. This is not the case with Mecha Break–if you can see it, you can fly over it. Of course, there’s a limit–fly too high and an alert will appear on screen alongside an out-of-bounds timer, signaling players to lower their altitude–but I didn’t often find myself flying too close to the sun.
One might imagine that with a map this big, keeping a squad together might be difficult, but in my experience, that wasn’t the case. Mecha Break’s Strikers fly fast and far, fuel reserves replenish quickly, and as long as you’re communicating with your team, you’re unlikely to find yourself in a situation where your squad is too far away to help.
Speaking of going airborne, flying in Mecha Break feels amazing. The game’s developers lean into airborne combat, rather than shy away from it, so each Striker has decent fuel reserves and can stay airborne for quite a while. I played the game with both mouse-and-keyboard controls and an Xbox controller, and both input methods felt equally seamless when I took to the sky.
Combat, too, felt seamless and satisfying. I played around with a few different mechs, but quickly found my favorite Striker in Alysnes, an agile, sword-wielding mech with an arsenal that also included a machine gun, a shield, and a special ability that shoots deadly lasers in multiple directions.. Mecha Break has an interesting lock-on mechanic–keep an enemy in your line of sight for a brief moment and a large red triangle will appear around them, indicating that your target is locked, and you’re free to fire away. The lock-on mechanic works the same way for every Striker, and if you lose sight of an enemy, you’ll have to get them back in your field of vision and lock on again if you want to continue attacking them. Thankfully, locking on doesn’t take long.
Alysnes’ gun does decent damage, but I had far more fun using her sword. With her sword equipped and her target locked, Alysnes will zoom toward the enemy and begin slashing away. If that target happens to be in the air, she will automatically go airborne as well, leading to tons of intense, mid-air fights to the death. Speaking of death, what happens when your Striker’s health hits zero depends on the game mode. In non-Mashmak matches, your pilot will automatically eject from their mech, and you’ll be removed from the battle for a brief time period before redeploying from the sky to rejoin your teammates. In Mashmak mode, your fellow squadmates will have to respawn you themselves.
In its current state, Mecha Break feels like Titanfall 2 if you gave it a can of Red Bull and let it spend the day playing Armored Core. It’s an incredibly good time, and does a great job of making you feel like you really are piloting a gigantic robot–bridges crumble when you forcefully land on them, parts of buildings break apart when you send an enemy crashing into them, and while the Strikers feel appropriately hefty, they never feel clunky.
Aside from the lack of variation in pilot body shapes and a few instances of rather silly looking jiggle physics on feminine pilots, it’s truly difficult to find much to complain about when it comes to Mecha Break’s current build. Unlike a lot of newer hero shooters currently on the market, Mecha Break appears to have a well-defined identity–it knows what it is, and it knows who it’s for. Though there are plenty of similarities to Titanfall, it never feels like a rip-off, and while the Alysnes Striker does feel a lot like Titanfall 2’s Ronin Titan, Mecha Break’s Strikers operate differently–and frankly, more gracefully–than Titans. You can’t manually eject your pilot and run around ripping batteries out of other mechs, nor does each Striker have a unique voice and distinct personality for you to grow attached to, but that doesn’t feel detrimental to the quality of the game.
Mecha Break doesn’t have a single-player campaign, but there is a tutorial mission, and the game has an ongoing plot revolving around the mining of a strange, crystal-like element known as Corite. Amazing Seasun Games says that the story will be supported with additional media, including manga and animated shorts. But even if you completely removed the plot from the equation, Mecha Break could still stand firm (and fly high) on the foundation of its gameplay, which thus far is engaging, smooth, satisfying, and frankly, fun as all hell.
Curious to learn more about Mecha Break’s development, I sat down with Amazing Seasun Games CEO and Mecha Break game director Kris Kwok to find out how exactly this high-flying hero shooter got off the ground.
“I came to Hong Kong when I was very young, so I got to know [of] mecha when I was very young, maybe when I was in the second or third year of primary school,” Kwok told me. “So, for Mecha Break, my biggest inspiration would be these works: First of all, Gundam. Secondly, Macross.”
Given the complexities of the game–13 mechs with various abilities, multiple modes, enormous maps–I was curious to hear what sort of challenges the development team faced while working to bring Mecha Break to life.
“In the Chinese market, as long as you’re doing something sci-fi related, [or] mecha-related, there’s almost no beginning,” Kwok said. “If you want to do something, you’ll be the first one [to do it]. So, in terms of hiring the right people and getting the right technology in place, we had barely anything to begin with. In the beginning, we invested in a British team. We learned a lot from the British team. Their original [idea] was to do it on PS2, a space-fighter shooter project. In the end, we’ve experienced several failures. The second time, we worked with the UK team, our team, and [a team of] Japanese designers. We failed. Then, we did it ourselves–we asked the Japanese designers to be our consultants. We failed. In 2021, I think we learned a lot. In this process [of failure], we learned a few key techniques that allowed us to break through. In terms of design, [that breakthrough was] the design language of mechas, [which] deviate from the traditional, low-quality toy-looking kind of appearances, and [look] way more cool.”
Another challenge was making Mecha Break’s mechs look appropriately robotic.
“You cannot just map the skin onto a human body, because mechas don’t move like humans,” Kwok explained. “We had to re-design the animation of the mecha’s skeletal structure, and then we had to follow up with animations in that sense. The second [challenge] in terms of technology was hard surface modeling. We had to make it [look] really hard, very industrial looking. Through numerous iterations, we mastered that as well.”
While we were on the topic of animation and modeling, I had to know: Why add such a detailed, RPG-esque character creator?
“Amazing Seasun Games already has a reputable history for the past three decades of making Chinese-themed traditional wuxia games,” Kwok explained. “So, we kind of transferred those core competencies over to the character-creation stage. We don’t want you just to identify with the hard metal mecha surface–there’s an actual person behind it: The human, the pilot, that you can eventually identify with. If you get to create a character that physically looks like you, the player, you will have a stronger sense of immersion in the world. You are playing that mecha, you are the pilot.”
Amazing Seasun Games has held a number of community playtests, so the next thing I wanted to know was how player feedback has shaped Mecha Break’s development. Kwok told me that he and his team have received a ton of player feedback regarding the game’s user interface and gameplay balance.
“In terms of the feedback that we’ve gotten, mostly it’s in terms of the product itself, the UI, the experience, etc.,” Kwok said. “So we’re working on that too. And the balance takes time, you know? Nobody can get it right the first time. I’m not surprised that we’ve gotten a lot of feedback in terms of balance as well, and the players had expectations of PvE in addition to PvP.”
It was at this point, Kwok said, he and the team were faced with a monumental decision: Should there be a single-player campaign?
“A [single-player] campaign is a one-time-through kind of deal,” Kwok said. “So we kind of decided against it.”
Another aspect I was curious about was balance. My experience with Mecha Break was smooth and seamless, and there was never a time where I felt one of the game’s 13 mechs had a massive advantage over the others, or a blatant weakness in need of addressing. I asked Kwok how on Earth the team went about balancing the game’s lineup of mech-heroes, and which mech was his favorite. The answer truly surprised me.
“So, first of all, as the producer and designer of all that–I’m not talking about the aesthetics or the outward appearances [of the mechs], but the weaponization was all done by me, myself–for me, each of them is like my own child,” Kwok told me, explaining that he had personally spent hundreds of hours playing and perfecting each mech. “So, it’s hard for me to tell you which one I like the most, because I had to play each one of them many times, try a lot of things, and constantly modify them.
“Of course, balance is a very, very difficult process. So in this process, the question is, ‘Which one is the most difficult to balance?’ I can’t say which one is the most difficult to balance. In terms of balance in this game, I’d rather stay away from the traditional buffing [or] nerfing some units, giving them more stats, HP, armor, all that.”
Instead, Kwok added that he’s more focused on “the actual player’s control in-game, rather than giving you a number to tell you which one is the hardest to balance. It’s always an ongoing process, there’s no endpoint [to] a game’s balance anyway.”
It’s clear that even while tweaking small details, Kwok always has his eye on the big picture first and foremost. When I asked what aspect of the game he was most excited for players to experience, he simply told me, “Actually, I think [I’m most looking forward to the reception of] the game as a whole. At its core, what we want to create in the game is the feeling of driving a machine gun. Whether it’s 6v6, Mashmak, or 3v3, we want all players to feel like, ‘Okay, I’m really driving this machine, I’m controlling this machine, it’s like part of my body.'”
“I’m counting on the player to experience that kind of integration, unity, the pilot being one with the mech,” Kwok said.
Mecha Break does not yet have an official launch date, but is slated for release on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S sometime in 2025. It is currently available to wishlist on Steam.