Steel Salvo

Steel Salvo is a free to play mech first person shooter on steam that launched April 7th of 2021. Steel Salvo the game, made by developer team Steel Salvo and published by Steel Salvo... *cough* really kind of confuses me. I initially encountered this one sifting through the 'Mechs' tag on the Steam store and found it is one of the highest rated free mech games. 160 positive reviews brings its total score to 96% positivity rating which ranks it as the 5th highest rated free mech game on the entire steam store. This of course made me interested in giving a go. I glanced over the store page trying to figure out what makes the game good as it downloaded in the background. Are there roguelike elements? It's an arena shooter? Cool! There's a full trailer that's over a minute long! Aaaaand then I played the game and... its 5 minutes of content. If you look at the store page and watch the trailer you've essentially seen more than half of the games entire playtime. I don't understand... is this a demo for something upcoming? A kickstarter pitch concept? No, this is a student project which I guess is fine maybe if the store page actually reflected that instead of coming across like some sort of more fully realized gaming experience. And only after digging up old social media posts can I even find out that this is a fully completed student project and not some sort of failed game concept demo kickstarter pitch thing. So who made it? There's a short list of developers but to not bore you I'll say the only one that I saw doing something interesting for ME personally was Charlie Wagner with his upcoming game HYPOGEA. It seems to be a visually retro low poly 3d dingy platformer about a robot guy, which looks SUPER rad to me. First things first, the STORY. It's simple. You are a mech pilot and a bad guy put three energy core BOMBS around the are and you're told to defuse them. If you pay attention to the dialogue you'll hear that you are on the moon, Triton of the planet Neptune. You'll end up getting a few voice messages from three different nameless characters. A younger androgynous lad, likely our contemporary, a chiseled older man with gray hair who I assume is our commanding officer and then also a sort of power ranger villain looking skull face guy, you know, the one that set us up the bomb. Also our teammates have some pretty sick Gurren Lagann sunglasses on. So how does it play? As you can see the game is a first person shooter and we've got three weapons at our disposal. Missiles, a minigun and a sword. Missiles lock onto targets, the minigame can either single fire or rapid fire depending on how long you click your mouse and the sword will actually heal you upon hit. You can also sprint, jetpack and dodge. We'll use these weapons to fight robot guys with machine guns, robot spiders with slow to shoot rifles and swarms of flying robo bugs. Our goal is to defuse the energy bombs, by shooting them, except they are shielded. As far as I can tell the shield drops after enemies within a certain radius around the shield are destroyed. Also each of the cores have a timer, so if you don't destroy one quick enough its kablooey to Neptunes moon and a game over. If you do defuse additional time is added to the timer. Speaking of timers, there are achievements and some in relation to time. Once you beat the game a hard mode version is unlocked which basically doubles the number of enemies, as well as duplicating the "beat the game" and "beat the game in x time" just in hard mode this time. There's also one for completing the tutorial, finding a hidden bunny and completing normal mode of the game without taking any damage at all. I got all these achievements except for specifically the timed one on normal mode. You got that right, I beat the timer in HARD but not in NORMAL difficulty somehow and I really can't be bothered to play through the game again and try to get it... I played the game for 50 minutes in total, I think a couple years ago I played it for 15 or 20 minutes and now I just replayed it on normal, hard, recorded footage for this video and did a little achievement hunting there... I kinda feel like I wasted my time with all this. So, the gameplay is pretty mediocre. I don't know if I'd say it feels BAD as much as... there's not a lot going on. They did get that feeling down of being a clunky and big robot but I think that might be unintentional on their part considering this game is advertised as a "super-fast first person shooter." As well as this ammo seems to reload ONE bullet at a time? So if you are dry firing holding the trigger down, you'll slowly deplete single bullets on reload timer instead of the full ammo capacity reload, which I felt was kinda odd. So whats good about Steel Salvo? Visually this game is really enjoyable. I like the bright and simple cartoony kinda style its going for. The little rabbit dangling around the cockpit of the mech. Enemy design is a little bland but honestly really whats expected as cannon fodder. The skybox is AWESOME and I wanna float off into it, forever drifting the cold and desolate splendor of a polychromatic starscape with vibrant planets and... The character portaits are totally on point, too. Not only that but their voices are great. I've consistently heard WORSE voicework come out of triple A games. Not that there's a large amount of voice work here but for what is there ya'know, they really WENT FOR IT. Final thoughts? Nothing more than a quick curio. At worst a waste of your time and at best something you'll want more of an probably never get. I don't like this and quite frankly it is almost entirely on how short this is as a game. Presentation is actually pretty good but the entire game lasts about 5 minutes. It is not replayable with roguelike elements or different weapon builds, which I suppose if that sort of thing was added could potentially even turn this into a game people would happily pay for. I guess there is the hard mode and achievements but even then it is still a 5 minute experience being stretched to the absolute limit. If I would of encountered this game with full understanding at outset that it was a student project and not some sort of full game experience I honestly would of avoided it. Which, I think is kind of a problem when perusing the Steam store in general, the presentation of something like Steel Salvo give indication of being some sort of complete gameplay experience and it isn't until downloading, playing and researching that you come to find out that this sort of thing is only a sort of proof of concept of a level 1 of a game that will NEVER have any continuation or completeness. full video review; https://youtu.be/d4Hm57wL81s?si=TBVI8fJ4YGEsfXjw