The strategy game Mechabellum isn’t about flipping the table when you make a mistake. In this autobattler you’re looking to fix your mistakes and push harder on your victories. This autobattler gives you ample time to watch those moments and figure out what to do next. Mechabellum’s matches scale from a small skirmish of cheap units to huge battles of titans and deadly swarms. It feels more like Total Annihilation than its autochess peers. It’s like other genre games where your units respawn at the start of every new round after you build this army piece by piece, one deployment phase at a time.
In autobattlers, you just place the losing units somewhere else and keep avoiding losing matchups. Mechabellum is all about working with what you’ve already put in place, you have to become better at its mechanics. Learn what units work best in which situations, and then use that knowledge to maximize every soldier you place. With limited supplies to go around, bigger and costlier isn’t always going to be better. Every match requires you to think and put out strong strategies that will force your opponent to respond to your deployments. A variety of cards are randomly offered between rounds that can be used to enhance or respond to these strategies, such as modifying certain unit stats, placing special items on single units to improve them, call-in abilities that provide airstrike-like attacks, or just general buffs.
In addition to offering a unique set of options each round, Mechabellum keeps things fair by offering the exact same set to each player as well as letting you read your opponent’s future moves. You cannot see what your opponent’s placed each deployment until the battle starts. Prediction is an important part of Mechabellum’s matches. Take advantage of their deployment patterns by predicting when, what, and where their units will be deployed. You can make big blunders when it goes wrong. You feel like the smartest commander on the planet when you lure your opponents into choosing strategies that you want them to invest in and then ambush them with a response that punishes the way they danced to your encouraging tune.
The swarms you filled the battle with to start off this strategy are not only the initial bait, they’re coming back around as the final closing of the trap. You could upgrade your Overlords so they can blow up the big Vulcans before they fry all your little drones. While they’re trying to figure out how to deal with your twists, you’re putting out even more stuff for them to handle while maintaining a firm grasp of the initiative—how about some Steel Balls? Upgrade your Crawlers to burrowing? Splash one-use missile launchers on their shields? Turn-based autobattlers have no real reflexes or APM requirements to speak of. Making the right choice from Mechabellum’s options is always the difference between victory and defeat.
There’s more to say about Mechabellum. Choosing which sets of upgrades to take into matches lets you prepare the options you can buy to tweak your units for different situations in each round, and strategic wrinkles add even more thought to the mix like flank deployment zones that allow for sneaky maneuvering, or defensive objectives that paralyze a side’s entire army when one of them is taken down (stop attackers from pushing through to your buildings, or they’ll destroy them and leave you vulnerable). Excellent practice and testing mode, make Mechabellum a strategic strategy game where every decision matters. Every mistake is an opportunity to learn and improve. Even when you’re firmly on the losing end, the combat phases are a fascinating spectacle.
It’s important to win matches not just by winning but by how much persistent damage. It is the sum of the supply cost of all remaining units on the field after each round. By clutching and destroying enough enemies to soften the overall blow before they eventually go down, defeats can be avoided. Watching my soldiers blunder into the right enemy in the right place makes me groan, or cheer for these little heroes. Mechabellum is compelling because of moments like that, and the iterative buildup of your strategy round after round. With its live-with-your-choices style of unit positioning, I was expecting a fun autobattler at first. What I found was a game that went beyond the genre to give me a kind of strategic PvP I’ve always wanted.
