Mechs vs. Minions

I need to talk about the insert before I talk about anything else, because it’s genuinely the best one I’ve ever unboxed. Everything has a slot, the sleeved scenario dossiers are organized so you’re never hunting for the right envelope, and I’ve caught myself just admiring the packing logic instead of actually setting up to play. Other publishers should be taking notes, and I say that as someone who has rebuilt three different inserts myself out of foam core because the stock ones weren’t cutting it.

The game underneath the box is a co-op action-programming crawler, you and your team each program a sequence of moves for your mech, then watch the chaos unfold as those programs execute simultaneously and inevitably go sideways. It’s got real RoboRally DNA, that same chaos-through-planning feeling, but compressed to about an hour and made cooperative instead of competitive, which suits my group better since we’ve got at least one player who hates head-to-head conflict.

Reading the mission dialogue out loud became a running bit for us, the writing is funnier than it needed to be for a game riding on a video game license, and my group started doing voices for the champions by the third scenario, which is usually a good sign a game’s tone is working.

Where it loses steam is exactly where you’d expect: once you’ve played through the campaign, there’s not a lot pulling you back. It’s mission-driven rather than systemically replayable, and my group finished the full run in about seventeen hours across a few sessions, then it went back on the shelf. I don’t regret owning it, the ratio of fun-per-hour while it lasted was excellent, I just don’t reach for it anymore the way I do with games built for indefinite replay.

Four stars. Great while it lasts, and I mean that as a real compliment, not a knock.