MechCom 2 Review

There are few things more satisfying than completely overwhelming your enemy and reducing them to ash. Seeing their smoking smithereens on the ground will fill you with a sense of accomplishment that is truly hard to match. Fans of the real-time strategy genre know this feeling, and it’s just as satisfying in Starcraft as it is in Company of Heroes. The problem is that, unless you have a light laptop, you can’t play these games on the go, so what’s an RTS fan to do? The answer is to get MechCom 2 and prepare for a lot of tank-based combat.
From the appropriately-named Game Dev Team comes MechCom 2, an Android strategy game that features three factions vying for territory. It’s your job to pick one and destroy the others. The main Domination mode lets you play as the Trionic (green), Sphenix (red), or Quadrum (blue) corporations. Those are essentially the three campaign paths that you can choose from, but you can freely switch between them at any time. The goal of Domination mode is to capture a new region of the map with every victory as the other factions try to accomplish the same thing. There are no significant advantages to any one path, so just pick your favorite color.

The gameplay in MechCom 2 is that of a simplified RTS, but not in a negative way. The gameplay is simple because it needs to be. Managing too many units, items, and resources via touchscreen would be absolutely ludicrous, so I applaud MechCom 2’s streamlined interface. Tap one of the fields you own to bring up a menu that shows you what you can build, which includes a Factory, Depot, and Refinery. Factories let you build tanks, Depots increase the amount of tanks you can have on the battlefield at one time, and Refineries raise the rate at which your currency increases.
Since you’re always facing off against an enemy army in MechCom 2, you only have a limited time to build up your structures and tanks before the opposing units come over to snuff them out. This is where the strategy comes in. Which control points will you take first? Will you build the more durable tanks even though they’re slower? Are you going to prioritize capturing territory quickly or just build up an army to unleash later on? All of these are important choices that will determine the outcome of the battle. I find it most satisfying to send the maximum number of tanks to each control point in order to conquer as much territory as possible with overwhelming force, but that’s just me.

The aesthetics of MechCom 2 are also very simple, and their streamlined nature is also a positive aspect of the game. Everything looks clean and easy to identify. In a game where your forces will be clashing head-on with the enemy’s, it’s very helpful to instantly determine which units belong to whom. It would be a nightmare if the colors of the factions were blue, purple, and teal. Thankfully, MechCom 2 is aware that you will be playing this on a relatively small screen that requires your thumbs to be all over it, so the interface is far from a hassle.
To the average RTS fan who is used to playing games of this genre on PC, MechCom 2 might seem too casual of a game, but that’s really up to the individual. Personally, I can still appreciate it as a very good RTS for your Android device, and the controls are great, which is necessity for a mobile game. It being a real-time strategy game, you have the freedom in how you plan out your enemy’s demise. Whether you want to be slow and steady or steamroll the opposite team, it’s all up to you. For a dollar, you really can’t go wrong with MechCom 2.