Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor

Steel Battalion ranks among the most gimmicky games of the past decade. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you. The Xbox game shipped with a massive controller that let players immerse themselves in the complicated machinations of piloting a mech-like vertical tank. Players had to flip switches and press buttons to control such mundane things as windshield wipers and activating a startup sequence. Most notoriously, players lost their saved game files if their vehicles were destroyed before the player pressed the emergency eject button.

Now Steel Battalion is coming to the Xbox 360. Don’t think that the series has given up on gimmicks, though. Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor is among the first games to utilize Kinect in tandem with a traditional Xbox 360 controller.

When the game was announced at last year’s TGS, we left the show wondering how Capcom would be able to pull it off. Would players have to wave their arms around madly like Tom Cruise in Minority Report? Would the vertical tanks’ control schemes be completely simplified to help players navigate with gestures? Would players just take on the role of the walking tank, lumbering around the battlefield and waggling their arms to fire? As it turns out, the answer seems to be none of the above.

I got to see a live demo of the game, and while it’s still very early, it could be one of the Kinect games that hardcore players have been begging for.

The game is set in the distant future, after a silicon-munching microbe has spread throughout the world. Technology as we know it is essentially destroyed, and the world has to start from scratch. In this alternate future, war is fought with World War II-era technology, though the vertical tanks have been added into the mix. The U.S. is invaded by a force that Capcom wouldn’t name (the patches on their uniforms sure looked Chinese, though), and 42 of the states have been overrun by those enemies. It’s up to the player, taking on the role of Winfield Powers, and his crew to fight back.

The mission we saw in the demo was set in the New York Harbor, as the U.S. was preparing to take back Manhattan. The battle opened like a bizarre version of Saving Private Ryan’s assault on Normandy. Soldiers in fatigues were torn in half by enemy fire, flopping back onto the beach in gushing chunks. Once the amphibious landing craft’s gate opens up, the VT is yours to control.

The game is set in the same claustrophobia inspiring cockpit as in the previous two games, but this time you don’t feel quite so alone. There are three other soldiers in your VT – a machine gunner, cannon operator, and communications officer. They’re positioned in various portions of the cockpit, and you swipe your arm in a wide motion to turn your view toward them.

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