GUNDAM. That word means a lot of different things to me. It was one of the first anime shows I watched when I was younger and from then on, I fell in love with giant robots, overly flashy space battles and overcompensating guns and have thus far played everything from Gundam Battle Assault on PS1 to Gundam Breaker 3. I even made a Singapore PSN account so I could download the DLC that we didn’t get in North America. I spent three weeks trying to teach my son how to say “Gundam” so it would be his first word; it didn’t go as expected, which is pretty much how Gundam Versus turned out for me as well. Where to start with what I wanted to be the ultimate Gundam game? Let’s start from the beginning.
As I mentioned I’ve played Gundam games since the PS1 game was released and I always enjoyed the story we got because usually they had a ridiculous reason why so many Gundam and Pilots were all in the same timeline, not so much for Gundam Versus…There is no story mode whatsoever. We got “Ultimate Battle” mode which is really just a survival mode with either 15, 30, or 50 waves to get through with some boss battles tossed in half-way through and at the end. Not exactly what I was expecting when comparing it to the Gundam Breaker and Dynasty Warriors Gundam series that I’ve enjoyed the last few years. This game is all about the online multiplayer. I should have expected that with all the promotional videos and commercials showing it, but I still wanted it to have something for the single players as well.
Online multiplayer consists of 1v1, 2v2 and 3v3 with the ability to fight against players in your region or allow it to search all over the world for match ups. I recommend you leave it to your own region if you decide to pick this game up otherwise you will have multiple connection errors and may be matched up against players that you won’t even be able to damage due to their connection being so slow. Each player also gets a support button that will call a suit to assist them in some way such as a melee or ranged attack to try and keep the enemy dodging so at one time you could have 12 suits on the field and laser blasts flying all over the screen. I didn’t have much luck connecting in a 3v3 which could be lack of players online or just server issues. When I did connect there was usually a time out error soon after.
Gundam Versus holds a roster of 90 Mechs with more to unlock as you progress through the story and also plenty of DLC to purchase if you want to beef up your roster early in the game. If you’ve never played a Gundam game I recommend you do the tutorial, and if you have played a Gundam game, I recommend you still do the tutorial because the game controls are some of the strangest I’ve had to deal with. The tutorial itself is really lackluster in letting you practice what you learn, but it at least tells you what each button does, which is good because you’ll have to learn combinations such as guarding involving having to press D-Pad down followed by D-Pad up and then holding up, that’s how you guard…so easy to pull off in a fast-paced game such as this. One complaint about the roster of 90+ suits is that not a single suit from G-Gundam made it into the game at all! No burning finger for you G-Gundam fans.
Visually, I think Gundam Versus does a great job with the suit models and the weapon and armor effects different Gundam have such as the 00 Series suits having the after-image effect when activating their “Trans AM” mode which increases their speed. The Suits look well defined when in contrast with the maps you play on, which include some destroyable environments with buildings and mountains crumbling when shot multiple times or crashed into by the suits you are piloting. There really isn’t much to say about how it looks because everything looks like it should when it comes to the Gundam suits themselves and environments aren’t really a focus since you move too fast to really enjoy them anyway.
In my opinion Gundam versus has one saving grace and it all comes down to the soundtrack, it has the main theme and a couple songs from every series available in the game for you to set as your music with any suit regardless of the series it originates from. Defeating the 50 wave Ultimate Battle with the “Iron Blooded Orphans” theme playing nonstop in the background really made it so much fun to try and pull off flashy moves made it that much more enjoyable for me to have to endure such a long survival game without any checkpoint system, so I could save and comeback to try and complete at a later time. The music doesn’t save the game, but it certainly makes it that much more bearable.
