Override: Mech City Brawl rocket-punches onto PC 2018

Oversized, city-smashing fighting games represent an ironically small and underappreciated genre, so I was grinning the entire way through Override: Mech City Brawl’s debut trailer below. It’s an arcade-style, over-the-shoulder 3D fighter in the vein of War of the Monsters or perhaps Virtual On. Players go 1v1 or 2v2 and trample buildings, pick up oversized power-up weapons and generally knock seven enormous metal bells out of each other until there’s just one team standing. Override will be be flattening Tokyo this December.

Originally pitched on Kickstarter in 2014 as a QWOP-esque game about multiple players sharing control of a stumbling giant robot, Override has somehow evolved into a fast-paced fighting game. Developers The Balance Inc haven’t entirely abandoned the original concept, as it’s included as an optional multiplayer mode where four players pilot a single mech together; one on legs, one on each arm and one on torso. For those without robo-buddies to beat up, there’s also a single-player story mode where you defend the earth from an alien invasion.

Override will launch with 12 playable mechs, and they’re a charming bunch. There’s a generic hero mecha-ninja with trailing scarf, an ancient Aztec magic robot, a straight-up Mechagodzilla clone, a luchador bot (complete with building-sized folding chair to smack people with) and a magical girl-bot that looks shockingly similar to Virtual On’s Fei-Yen among them. Oh, and a retro-gaming robot with a CRT monitor for a head and an oversized almost-NES for a body. It all reminds me of Tech Romancer for Arcade/Dreamcast, and its large cast of parody knockoff robots.

I’m hugely eager to get my grubby mitts on this one, having played just about every city-smashing action game I could find since Rampage in the ’80s. The action looks to contain a familiar blend of elements reminiscent of Virtual On, War of the Monsters and even a little bit of Power Stone and maybe (at a stretch) some of Nintendo’s recent offbeat fighter Arms.

Override: Mech City Brawl won’t be out until December 4th, but there will be a closed beta event starting August 10th, which you can sign up for on its official site here.