WarTech: Senko No Ronde

To be perfectly honest, I’ve always had a place in my heart for insanely difficult shoot’em ups. Hidden beneath my love for FPS’s, just behind my secret urges to play Feeding Frenzy into the wee hours, is a little twinkle of warmth for a solid danmaku title. My love for the unrelenting bullet curtain would be greater if I didn’t so thoroughly suck at them.

My initial impressions of WarTech: Senko No Ronde for the 360 were overwhelmingly negative. The menus, crammed with super-thin sans-serifed fonts, looked more at home on a racing title than a fighter, and the subtitled Japanese gave no indication that I had even the slightest chance of figuring out the plot. I almost pulled the plug on the title in the first five minutes. That said, the next thing I knew is that I had unlocked the “10 hour played achievement” and had enjoyed every minute of it.

WarTech is a game that does one thing flawlessly: combining the manic gameplay of a “bullet hell” shump with the special moves and power-ups of a robot fighter. So what if the “story” mode is indecipherable? Who cares if each playable character fights the same sequence of matches and battles the same boss on the final stage? I didn’t, and fans of the genre won’t either. I would even venture to say that WarTech is a fabulous title to introduce players to the genre(s).

Each character pilots an unique war machine (called rounders) through a series of 6 stages in story mode. The first 5 stages are composed of single round matches much like a 2D fighter, and the final stage is a multi-round boss battle. Once a player has become accustomed to each rounders special abilities, stages are quick and fulfilling. Even though I have a special place in my heart for the shump genre, I consider myself a novice. After getting a hang of the controls, I was able to complete each character’s story mode in about an hour.

When we review games we try to make it a point to be as honest about its failures and accomplishments, but in the case of WarTech I feel it’s important to gloss over the failures and get to the juicy middle. Each match blends the fighter action and frantic shooting so well that I simply don’t care what the title may do wrong. WarTech is a game that you can pick up, bang out a quick round and score a fair clip of achievements as you go.

I can’t re-iterate enough how compelling this title has been after I shrugged off the plot and short stages. Fans and newcomers to the shump genre should pick this title up. Just don’t expect a story.