I've been playing Phantom Crash again. The first time I played it, I inevitably got completely mashed up because I didn't know how to play it and probably picked the A-rank matches instead of the beginner D-rank matches.
However, I read the tutorial and am now good at the game! YES!
What little of the game there is, at least.
You bounce, you dive, you go invisible, you run out of ammo, you WAIT A MILLION YEARS FOR THE BOSS TO APPEAR, you kill them, you get money, you upgrade your robot.
Except you don't upgrade your robot. Robot game fans may be familiar with the format where your robot is modelled as a series of components: a chassis, legs, arm weapons, backpack weapons, special items. They're all here in Phantom Crash, except there's only really one type of each. Here's how it works:
There's three 'flavours' of robot you can have: Photon, Holy and Aeron. You can't mix pieces from different flavours. Because you can't.
Within each flavour of robot, there's different weapons and leg mounts you can add to the basic core. Specifically, there's one of each. Say you want to begin with a robot that wields two basic arm pistols and a rocket launcher backpack and uses a Johnny Five set of tracks. That's it. There's one type of each of those. There's no 'better pistol'. You've just made your first and last ever robot.
You can 'tweak' the pieces by spending absolutely hideous amounts of ingame cash, if you're feeling up to it. Each piece has a slider ranging from 'Light' through 'Normal' to 'Heavy'. 'Light' weapons are lighter, weaker, and carry more ammo. 'Heavy' weapons are heavier, more powerful, and carry less ammo. 'Heavy' leg mounts are slower, but allow your robot to hold more weight.
You get your own AI co-pilot as well, which represents your ability to lock on to targets. You can upgrade them too! After each battle, spend all your money on an AI level up, and your lock-on range will increase by a single pixel. YAY.
I guess it's a tactical thing to only be able to have a robot that's slightly 'this' or 'that', but when the computer cheats (because it has to) and has significantly more powerful weapons and armor than you can ever have, it's just not very fun and all a bit stupid.
If you're a canny sort, you can do the maths and come to the conclusion that if you had infinite money, you could whack all the sliders to an extreme, causing the game to give you another 'special item' slot so you can give your robot 20% extra health at no disadvantage, but that does rely on you winning the game a few times over to get the necessary funds.
The player is supposed to complete matches in each level, in day and night to progress through the game. I'm told that this reveals the plot. Didn't really happen to me. Phantom Crash makes up for this by showing absolutely baffling cutscenes before each battle where the pilots of the robots (and their AI animal co-pilots) meet up and talk complete nonsense at each other until you hold down the 'skip conversation' button and make them go away.
Very occasionally, these scenes include discussion of the tournament you're participating in. Usually, they're along the lines of.
Quote:
Takeshi: Hey, MATT, do you like noodles?
Sarah: Takeshi ate all my noodles. Wahh!
Sarah's co-pilot: That's not very nice!
Takeshi: So what? I can do whatever I like.
Takeshi's co-pilot: Takeshi has an 99% probability of being correct.
Sarah's co-pilot: That's not very nice!
Takeshi: C'mon, MATT, let's battle. I bet you a bowl of ramen I'll win!
Sarah: Taaaakeeeeshi!!!! ;-;
<level select screen>
To complete a level, you wait for twenty minutes, blasting simple stupid enemy robots until the boss decides to show themself. When they do, it's a matter of luck whether you win or not. It takes more ammo than you can carry to kill the boss in most cases, so you need to hang around the ammo and health crate respawn point a lot. All robots have the power to become temporarily invisible, it renders all enemy robots and enemy missiles completely useless, unless you're against the boss where it just doesn't work.
On my latest battle, I do the mandatory 15 minute wait before the boss character shows himself. We spar for another five minutes due to his robot having five times the HP of mine, and I hog the only location on the map where health and ammo can appear. We take turns engaging our invisibility powers and pretending not to be able to see each other.
Suddenly, he blasts me from being at 60% HP and invisible to dead with a single shot from the railgun he didn't use until that point. Blah.
No more Phantom Crash for me.
I looked up the ending of the game (because I like looking up game endings) and found that
ZOMG Spoiler! Click here to view!
wouldn't you know, nothing happens at all.
Because of the abusive way the AI animal co-pilots treat their pilots, I was expecting some kind of AI animal conspiracy to happen, and I would have to defeat a horde of AI controlled robots at some point. My plot is way better than their plot. My plot makes sense!