Phantom Crash

"A Dissapointing Mech Experience"

Phantom Crash is your average mech shooter. You pick the parts, smack em' together and proceed to beat the living crap out of the opposition. But, Phantom Crash does little to stand out among other mech games, specifically, Armored Core and Steel Battalion (my two personal favorites). The result is an average at best mech game that leaves you desiring more.

Graphics: 7 Phantom Crash, not surprisingly, sports only slightly above-average visuals. The mechs themselves are fairly good, the environments, (all three of them) are bland. The buildings that make up the environments come in four different colors, all shades of brown, and have about 12 pixels each.

Sound: 5 UGH! For some reason I found the music in this game to be soul-shatteringly (yes, that's right, soul-shatteringly) annoying. Maybe it's the fact that I think God never intended for J-Pop to exist, but if you ask me, it all sounds the same. Custom soundtrack support would have been nice, but hey, you can't have everything.

Crappy music aside, the sound effects also do little to catch ones attention. Expect the typical weapons sound effects here.

One good thing about the sound, though, is the lack of voice acting. I can't even begin to imagine how bad it would be.

Gameplay: 6 The outer shell of Phantom Crash is actually rather good. At the start of the game, you get just enough cash to buy an average mech with which to pummel your opponents with. Buy a pre-made on from one of three manufacturers, or build your own dream machine from scratch. The catch is, you cannot mix parts from manufacturer to manufacturer, which, unfortunately, means that with a few exceptions, you have three different mechs with many slight variations. Fortunately, the selection of parts is considerably large, if not that varied. You can also decorate your mech with a variety of colors and decals.

It appears that the games creators were so interested in making Phantom Crash so customizable that they forgot that the game should actually be fun. Once you get out on the field of battle the game nose-dives. There are three (and only three) arenas to fight here. One would expect to find three huge interactive environments to battle in. Well, you won't find that here. The levels, which have insultingly simple designs, can be memorized in approximately five minutes. The small environments, coupled with the fact that there is but one objective every time you play- ''kill the other guys,'' make for the same experience every time you play.

Story: 2 The story of this game is pretty much trash. It follows the time honored tradition of the ''Some guy decides to kill everyone'' storyline. This method works for Quake, but not here. The character dialogue makes you want to go out and remove a body part with a sharp object it is so annoying. And I'm not exaggerating there.

I wanted to like Phantom Crash. I really did. But, it does so many things wrong I can't bring myself to say I did.

Rent or Buy? If you are really bored, give it a rent. But only if you're desperate.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/12/03, Updated 01/12/03