The top down shooter has always been a genre that is, at best, divisive. The ability to shoot things all around you does take away a bit from the tension innate in a shooter, but the ability to plan out attacks has always made it cool. Since there’s so little tension and so much more strategy, it’s always been perfect for online shooters. So where did Carbon Games’ AirMech go wrong?

AirMech says it’s a DotA, or Defense of the Ancients, style game, but what the game makers don’t understand is that DotA actually has strategy to it. In AirMech if you carefully plan out your attack against the enemy base and prepare a battle strategy to use every environment and skill to your advantage, you’re probably going to lose to the other team that just runs and shoots you.

The style of the game is flat and bland: everything’s been done before, so there’s little to

shock you when playing this game. The game says it’s about a post-apocalyptic world where everyone finds mechs and is fighting for land now, but it looks suspiciously like two children had the exact same color coordinated toys and are throwing them at each other.

The gameplay is solid, although boring. There’s not a lot of genuine excitement to be had, and the game really becomes based on who moves in the most insanely serpentine pattern rather than who planned out their moves the best. They haven’t added anything new to any genre that abounds today.

What, then, makes this game interesting? That’s a good question, and it doesn’t really have an answer because AirMech is one of the most tedious games to be played. It tries to remain more fast-paced as a shooter while keeping the strategy of a Real Time Strategy game, but it fails at both by being too slow for a shooter and too fast for an RTS. You can simulate AirMech by yawning loudly and playing some halfway decent music.