It's always crazy to look at deep cuts and early efforts from some of the more celebrated developers and publishers in the industry.
When we think of Nintendo, franchises like Mario, Zelda and Metroid come to mind almost immediately. But does anyone remember Excitebike? Not going to lie, those of us of a certain age probably do, but it's not really top of mind as a Nintendo franchise. At this point, isn't F-Zero considered a deep cut Nintendo Franchise? I mean, more than 20 years without a new game, right? Maybe it's time for a new one? Anyway, every gaming company had to start somewhere. It's not like Nintendo just popped up one day and started cranking out Mario games, they actually made Hanfuda playing cards for almost a century before they started cranking out light guns for Magnivox and creating consoles like the Color TV Game. But we won't be talking about the Big N today. We are going much further into the alphabet to the big R, everyone's favorite edgy developer/publisher, Rockstar Games.
Rockstar is a household name nowadays, but it wasn't always that way. The studio developed and published quite a few oddball games in the late 90's and early 00's. That all changed in 2001, when Grand Theft Auto III hit the scene. That game essentially strapped a rocket to the company and they never looked back. But before GTA III took the gaming world by storm, there were a slew of weird Rockstar titles. Of course, there were the previous GTAs, which were very different from their successor. There was a PS2 title called Oni that a lot of people talk up, I will probably play that at some point. But today, we are going to discuss a title called Wild Metal, a third-person vehicle shooter originally released for the PC and ported to the Dreamcast. I will be branching a little more into PC games soon, but for now I'm sticking to consoles and thus I played the Dreamcast version. The game was developed by DMA design, which later became Rockstar North, and published by the then relatively unknown Rockstar. With so many quality titles to their name today, maybe Wild Metal was a hidden gem that served as a base for their more well known games?
Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. Wild Metal was a frustrating slog, with sluggish physics, weak graphics and confusing presentation. I've definitely played worse, but it was shocking to see how little personality and energy there was in this game from a studio that's known for those things. There is a plot here, something about aliens wiping out humans on some planet and the humans now deciding to fight back because they have tanks or something. Yeah, it's not really significant at all and the game itself doesn't actually bring it up, any and all attempts at story come from the manual. That's not really a big deal with action games or vehicle shooters or whatever this is, especially if the gameplay is good. But Wild Metal falls flat in the gameplay department as well.
We will start with the controls, which aren't actually too bad in a vacuum. They are a little odd, but that's more a function of the Dreamcast controller, they did as good a job as they could have without multiple joysticks. You use said joystick to move forward and turn, while the shoulder buttons move the turret. The camera orients itself based on where the turret is and it doesn't automatically return to facing forward, which was a little odd to get used to. But once I did I had it down pat an it wasn't a long term issue. It would have been nice to have a button to instantly reorient, but that was the least of the problems. That came from the game feel and physics, which were nonsensical at best and absolutely miserable at worst. Your tank moves painfully slow and the impact of terrain on it seems to be random. You will frequently come up to small hills that it looks like you can scale, your tank will get about half way up before falling down and ending up on its back like a turtle. Try as you might, you can't get up that hill. But the game makes you think you can, so you will keep trying. That's a major problem.
Enemy combatants are few and far between, you will occasionally see a turret or another tank but the they are few and far between. Your tank only has two attacks, a land mine and its turret. Land mines are surprisingly useful here, or at least they would be if there were more actual enemy tanks, because the AI is so bad that the computer actually drives over them. But the turret moves in an arc, making it damn near impossible to hit anything with. The hit detection is fine, but the game doesn't really tell you when you hit something or when you are getting hit. I rarely died because there were so many health pickups, but when I did it felt sudden and unfair.
The graphics are mediocre at best, I guess that's to be understood because it's a port of an older game. But even for the mid 90's Wild Metal's graphics are bland. There are a lot of big open spaces, a lot of dull, muted colors and very little else. The tanks are boring, the enemies are one note and the environments are lifeless. This is all compounded by the weird overlays that are present throughout the game. The HUD doesn't really provide you very much information and it's extremely obtrusive. It looks and feels like a mid-tier DOS game from 1992 and that's not a good thing. Fortunately, the music isn't bad. Unfortunately, the music isn't good either. Because there is no music during gameplay. At all. That's unacceptable for an action game in 2001. All you have are sound effects, which are actually pretty solid. Unfortunately, hearing the revving of your tanks engine, an occasional explosion and nothing else gets old really, really fast.
Hey, we all have to start somewhere, right? Unfortunately, Wild Metal was just awful and it's not worth going back to, even as a curiosity. I'm not the biggest fan of Rockstar games, but even at the time they were capable of way better than this. Any time you have an action game and one of the biggest complaints is that there's very little action, it's a major problem. It's not even like the original Street Fighter, where you could see the building blocks of a good title in a bad one. This was just not very good. If you are looking for an interesting curiosity from Rockstar's early days, maybe check out one of the first two GTA titles, I might do that myself soon. But stay far away from Wild Metal.
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