At this stage of my life it’s starting to feel like I’ve played pretty much anything you can imagine in the form of a roguelike deckbuilder. Spaceship battles? Played it. Stock trading? Played it. Throwing dogs into a big pit? You better believe I’ve played it.
So when one comes along with a genuinely novel idea, my ears do tend to prick up. Mechborn is definitely that, inserting cards and turn-based fights into a world of giant mechs battling kaiju.
It’s a great concept, and the chunky visuals and hi-tech UI sell it well. With music that has more than a touch of the Pacific Rim theme to it, and surreal monsters right out of a ’90s anime, it wears its influences on its sleeve—but it does them justice.
A roguelike deckbuilder lives or dies on its mechanics, however, and heading into a run with an early build of the game, I was at first worried Mechborn might be style over substance. The very easy early battles make the game seem formulaic—faced with a deck full of 5 value attacks and shield cards, a choice of a starting item that grants a passive bonus, and very familiar buffs (strength adds to my damage, you say?), it can feel like Slay the Spire in a robot costume.
But as I forged on, I started to see more and more unique personality in the way a Mechborn run plays out.
For one, it turns the path to the boss into its own strategic challenge. Rather than simply progressing along a track and meeting the occasional fork in the road, Mechborn sets me loose across an entire country map. I can move freely into any region adjacent to a region I’ve already visited, allowing me to roam around in search of shops, healing, lucrative fights, and other perks.
Getting the most out of my journey to the boss is all about clever resource management. Visiting new regions chips away at my store of fuel, while harder battles deplete my HP, and most of the goodies I can go after have a cost in credits.
Is it worth fighting my way to that refueling station to extend my journey as long as possible, or should I make a beeline for that upgrade station to improve my deck? Do I need to seek out more battles for their card rewards, or is my deck already where it needs to be? They’re really interesting choices, where in most roguelikes I’m simply sleepwalking between map nodes.
The more I explore, the harder monsters I’m able to go up against, and the more I start to appreciate the nuances of Mechborn’s combat system too. For one, my hand of cards isn’t really a hand at all—it’s a conveyer belt.
As cards are played, new ones are slotted in from the left, shunting all the others along to the right. I only get four energy per turn to play them, but unusually for the genre I’m never limited by card draw—and I always have a wide range of choices in front of me.
Certain cards play with this format in interesting ways. There’s one in my deck, for example, that has no effect when played, but boosts the damage of attack cards positioned adjacent to it on the belt. Getting the most out of it means playing cards as much just to rearrange the order as for their effects—but commit too hard to the combo-building, and I’m liable to take a few too many hits along the way. A tricky balance.
Things get really interesting when I pick up the Drifter card. This one certainly plays up the conveyer belt feel, because its effect is all about its journey down the row. Every time I play one of the cards on its right and it’s shunted along, it flips my stance—that is, whether I’m standing or flying.
Some cards have different effects depending on whether I’m on the ground or in the air—such as a laser blast that’s more powerful from above, or a powerful shield that forces me to land. But the really fun part is that every time I crash down to earth, I cause a shockwave, dealing damage to every enemy.
Soon I’m contriving ways to move Drifter as often as possible, and then use other effects to swap it back to the start of the belt, so that I can be constantly leaping up and down and crushing my foes beneath my feet like a 200 ton Mario. Now that’s a deck archetype I’ve never built in a game before.
By the end of this demo, I’m left really keen to see what other strategies there are to discover with more tinkering in the mech bay. In some ways this is a very familiar implementation of a classic formula, but the twists it does deploy are cleverly chosen to shake up how that formula feels in play. And I’m not going to lie, it simply never gets old watching giant robots blast mutated behemoths.
You can try Mechborn for yourself now, though currently not in the form of a convenient Steam demo—instead you’ll need to download the pre-alpha build on the game’s itch.io page. The full release is currently planned for winter this year.
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