Last night, Carbon Games were kind enough to let me get my grubby mitts on the work-in-progress alpha build of their upcoming action/RTS hybrid AirMech. Having sunk a few hours into it, I’m almost ready to tell you why you should be very excited about this game. But before I can really explain why AirMech is such a big deal, we need to take a stroll down memory lane. After the jump, a gameplay video and the reason why AirMech is your daddy’s RTS. Read on.

Herzog Zwei, released on the Genesis/Megadrive back in 1990, and believed by many to be one of the first true RTS games. Rather than play as a distant and detached commander, Herzog Zwei put you in the cockpit of a Macross-esque transforming jetfighter/robot hybrid, capable of ferrying troops from your bases and into the field, or switching to humanoid form and fighting alongside your troops on land.

And now, compare and contrast with AirMech:

The family resemblance is remarkable. AirMech is effectively a direct update of a formula almost completely forgotten for the past 21 years. Fortunately, rather than slavishly adhere to the original formula, Carbon have expanded and refined the concept, implementing a range of modern concepts and logical additions to the gameplay. While the core inspiration of the game is clear, there’s a little bit of Advance Wars DNA and even a dash of DOTA floating around here.

As the gameplay video above shows, the general flow of gameplay is pretty simple and intuitive. Build units, defend your base, capture forts around the map (which act as resource generators and additional spawn-points for your troops) and try to blow up the enemy base. You can queue up a maximum of three units to construct at any given time, but they won’t deploy automatically – they’ll appear, ready for pickup, as you fly over your base or one of your forward forts, letting you pick them up, assign an order as you place them (attack, defend, capture, etc) and then fly off to grab another vehicle. Forts also act as safe-zones, repairing and shielding your mech while steadily churning out a stream of expendable free infantry units; the only unit type capable of capturing forts from the enemy, but also the most vulnerable.

Controls are simple and intuitive. While mouse and keyboard are supported, right now it seems the ideal way to play the game is with an Xbox 360 controller (or equivalent). The controls for flight and combat have been updated to modern twin-stick style, with unit construction happening on a quick radial menu. This game definitely falls on the ‘action’ side of Action/RTS, with command of your units being limited to standing orders such as ‘capture nearest fort’ or ‘attack the enemy base’, which you can issue to each unit individually. You’re not dealing with intelligent troops here – they’re an extension of your own mech, effectively. Want to launch a flank attack where enemy defenses are weak? Ferry several units off to the side of an objective and then give them the order to charge. And every moment you’re building and commanding, you’re not fighting on the ground. It’s a delicate balancing act, and you really can’t afford to sit around for more than a couple of seconds at a time.

Beyond the core combat gameplay, there’s a degree of metagame. As you play matches, you slowly accrue Kudos, the standard unit of currency in the game, and your player account levels up. You can spend kudos to unlock new types of mech (such as a helicopter, a stealth bomber, a UFO, etc, each with their own stats and special abilities on land or in flight), new pilot/commander characters (each giving a balanced set of perks and flaws in rather Advance Wars-esque fashion), and new unit types, which you can swap in for units on your existing build wheel of 8. Level determines which sets of mechs, commanders and units are available for you to purchase, although the general idea seems to be that no one commander, mech or unit will be better than another, just more or less specialized. A construction expert pilot is going to be worse at direct combat than the default jack-of-all-trades character, for instance.

This all ties in to a key point of debate on the developers forums – at the time of writing, it seems quite likely that AirMech will be a free-to-play game, with a business model inspired by the thunderously popular DOTA-esque League Of Legends. Given the enormous success of such F2P endeavours recently, giving active playerbases in the hundreds of thousands, it seems like the logical way to go. If Carbon do go this way, making everything except purely aesthetic ‘bling’ items available through extended play, with premium players just unlocking stuff sooner, I can see this being a hit. It certainly seems a safer option than just releasing as a retail title. As great as titles like Shattered Horizon are, they don’t exactly boast bustling player-bases.

It really should be noted that this game is still being worked on heavily. At the moment, a lot of graphics and animations are outright missing, with non-fighter mechs just using the default humanoid model when transformed. Even menu text right now is amusingly terse, with descriptions such as ‘Tank. Build these.’ on standard units. It’s still early days, but the core gameplay is there and it works surprisingly well. I wouldn’t mind seeing some tweaks such as adjusting flight speed when firing backwards (your jetfighter can fly at full speed in reverse while shooting) and perhaps a little more solidity and weight when engaging with ground units, but these are minor quibbles with a game still deep in development, and will no doubt be refined and improved on.

Right now, the game is primarily a botmatch game, as online play is limited to direct-IP connections at the moment, but this will naturally change as the game nears release and a master server is set up for proper matchmaking. Still, even in this early state, with only a handful of mechs and unit types, AirMech is a lot of fast-paced arcade RTS fun, and well worth your continued attention as it edges closer to release. You can sign up for Alpha access on the Carbon Games site below, although Alpha invites are only being handed out to those the developers think would be helpful as testers, so apply on their forum if you think you might be able to help.

[Carbon Games]