I consider Michael Bay to be one of my least favourite directors. He hasn’t made a truly great flick in years, while making several mangled attempts in the form of Pearl Harbour, The Island etc… He’s all macho style over substance, and I tend to get a little sick from all the testosterone. However, despite his faults the recent Transformers movie was quite an enjoyable romp. Pure “Bayhem” at its finest, you might say. Why am I telling you this? Well, because no matter how unsubtle, short-sighted or unimaginative a person or team of persons might be, it’s pretty much impossible for them to deliberately make the act of big stompy robots beating the hell out of each other boring. The concept is just too extreme, too awesome, too appealing. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that such an occurrence would require a special brand of backward ingenuity, a kind of ignoble innovation to pull it off. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present Dynasty Warriors: Gundam.

Let’s be clear. This is a Dynasty Warriors game, and fans of the series will know exactly what to expect. The last time I played a DW title was back on my trusty Xbox. I enjoyed it for a time, especially in the company of friends with the game’s built in co-op. It was ideal lazy weekend gaming and in retrospect I would rate the whole experience quite highly. Fast forward several years. I’m older, wiser, and sporting a rather unsettling ginger goatee (Don’t ask). I’m playing the newest DW title. And it’s exactly the same.

The game has two campaign modes (plus a versus mode I was unable to test as no one wanted to play the game with me), one touted as being based on the Gundam series and the other claiming to be “Original” mode, featuring some under-wrought piece of sci-fi hackery about some mysterious planet or other. As a newcomer to the Gundam universe the story in both modes and the characters within are completely impenetrable, with no attempt made to properly explain anything. This will leave several burning questions to bug you during play such as – “Who is that guy?”, “Why are we fighting these guys?”, “Why should I care about those other guys?” and, possibly the most troubling of all, “Why the hell is my prepubescent wanklet of a character allowed to pilot a clanking, light-sabre wielding death machine?”.

Regardless, in each mode you’ll be selecting one of three characters and taking to the battlefield in a Mobile Suit – these are the big stompy robots mentioned earlier. You fight hordes of other Mobile Suits, assisted by some other, unremarkable friendly characters, also in Mobile Suits. The now DW staples of combo attacks, control zones, poor draw distances and utterly brainless AI are all present and correct. The enemies are plentiful, with the average mission body count easily hitting the mid to high hundreds, while all being nearly indistinguishable save for their different colours.

And to be frank, the missions are a bit pants. For a game on a next-gen console the terrain you find yourself in is pretty featureless and possessed of almost zero interactivity. Buildings are not scratched despite having my supposedly towering, heavily armoured battle suit smashed against them. Forests are not trampled in my wake and the landscape seems unblemished at the end of each clash. Mission objectives can change quite quickly during battle, resulting in you having to hoof it from one end of the field to the other which (despite my suit being able to fly for brief periods) takes ages. You get dragged all over the place and it is confusing and near-impossible to prioritise objectives properly. As previously hinted most of your enemies hail from the “Stand around your opponent silently while he knocks you down one by one” school of combat theory, and most objectives can ultimately be achieved by slaughtering a pre-set number of opponents.

Die hard Gundam fans will extract limited enjoyment, old DW fans even less. Everyone else will be wondering why they aren’t just playing Assassin’s Creed instead.