The consensus behind the Kinect/Controller hybrid of Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor is one of an incomplete failure that's stalled by the same technology that's supposed to innovate it. While most people don't put stock into Metacritic, it does bring us the only positive review from the "Official XBOX Magazine:"
"Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor is punishingly hardcore. You will painstakingly learn the complex Kinect controls and make minor tactical errors on the battlefield that turn your spry mech into a pile of rubble in seconds. Suck it up and approach the experience with that in mind, and you'll enjoy the game."
Their general advice comes from your piloting a futuristic, low-tech walking tank, so of course there'll be a few bugs. Except a few bugs seems to be a massive failure in gameplay, functionality and Kinect intergration. Polygon briefly rounded up four other reviewers' experience with the game. Common findings? Not a lot of people even made it past the third level, let alone the tutorial that explains how to change from one view to another, or to save your crewmate from being killed, like in Kotaku's point:
""At times, you'll need to respond to events quickly, like when an enemy reaches in and tries to slit the throat of your co-pilot. In that moment, I'd need to swipe to turn my head and change my view and would then hold my arm out to aim a sidearm at the enemy. This worked maybe 70% of the time and I watched my squadmate die horribly over and over."
As awesome as the future of gaming sounds, we think it's better for everyone if the bugs get fine-tuned out of the Kinect/Controller intergration, let alone every review going into painstaking detail about how they have to re-arrange their living room just to play a few brief seconds before dying. Give us the original's bulky, pointless physical controller of the Kinect, it seems like, any day.
