GunGriffon: Allied Strike Critic Reviews

If Strike gets its mechanics brashly right, it fudges the details.

Something about the controls, the atmosphere, the universe it takes place in, the designs of the mechs ... something about all of these things makes me forgive a lot of the problems the game has.

If you must have every mech game out there, GunGriffon isn't that bad. It doesn't meet expectations with such great games on the market that already fill the mech genre for the Xbox.

The game truly is at its finest when you're with a group of allies and you're forced to work against the enemy's onslaught of foes, but sadly there just isn't enough of this to keep anyone coming back to the single player campaign.

It feels like a war machine that is too far behind the times, and it gets blown away by its competitors before it can even begin the battle.

There is no doubt that this is one ugly looking game. It also lacks a host of features that are standard in other similarly styled games - such as a storyline, cutscenes and upgradable models. Still, there is something refreshing about the simplicity of the game. It's almost fun.

Just be forewarned - although this game offers Xbox Live support, nobody is playing it online. After two weeks of trying, I never found a single game online.

GameArts' sequel has some game chops, fleshed out in the meatier offline defense battles and in the Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch, but this game won't thrill you for long. Or at all, depending on your patience for ugly, technically inferior games.

Playing missions with another human player (instead of the brain-dead A.I. ally you usually get) makes things far easier at the start, giving you a chance to learn basic battle strategy without dying every other moment.

Then again, if there is some nugget of old-school gamer lurking in your core being and you don't mind outdated graphics and unbalanced gameplay then give this game a shot. With any luck it will be in the bargain bins soon enough.

Clunky and out of control, GunGriffon: Allied Strike is barely out of the beta phase. At least that's how it plays. Everything you do is slow.

Primitive production values, flaws in the single-player campaign, and a sometimes lag-ridden experience in online play make GunGriffon: Allied Strike difficult to recommend.

Dummied down graphics that are reminiscent of late Playstation 1 and early Playstation 2 almost kill the mood right from the get go. Stupidity within computer AI takes a major toll on the intensity level of GunGriffon as well.

It's got nasty graphics mixed with almost decent graphics, unbalanced controls, and completely lackluster sound.

Sure, it's got a few unique nuances, but in the end, a half-assed game deserves a half-assed score.

This is supposed to be the Microsoft Xbox, the most powerful system out of the big three. So why does this game look like a mediocre Playstation 2 game? The mech machines designs are very boring, the graphics and texture throughout the whole game are stale and bland.

This must rank as one of the blandest-looking shooters on the Xbox - after all, we have been treated to Mercenaries and Microsoft's own MechAssault 2, so there really is no excuse for the low-res, blandly textured environments found here, made all the worse by the disgracefully close draw distances.

Seems to have fallen victim to the gaming equivalent of Darwinism. By not evolving with the changing times, the GunGriffon franchise looks like it may have finally gone the way of the dodo.

I'm sorry Tecmo, but even though we mech sim fans are rather neglected and abused these days, that doesn't mean that you can shovel out a pile of dung and expect us to start devouring it. "Unacceptable" is a label I can slap on just about every aspect of Gungriffon: Allied Strike.

The die-hard giant robot fan may get some mileage out of the multiplayer modes (despite some lag in larger games) but even they will be disappointed by the poor presentation. Rarely has the future of combat seemed to be stuck so far in the past.