The RPS Advent Calendar 2024, December 11th

This door was ordered to open earlier

When I were a lad, you’d open an advent calendar and get a piece of chocolate shaped like a bell with an aftertaste so rancid you’d wish you’d eaten the little cardboard window instead. And you’d bloody well make do, too. Not these days. Now, you get a squadron of tiny automata with drills for noses that burrow through your battle lines and utterly wreck your vulnerable missile launchers. Country’s gone to the tiny robot dogs, I tell you!

Wait, hang on. I’m actually thinking of Mechabellum!

Nic: Competitive games are hard and stressful, and competitive RTS games are hard enough to knock out a steel-plated reindeer, and stressful enough to make that reindeer wake up with PTSD afterward. Not so Mechabellum, which I reckon even a battered, traumatised reindeer would have a pretty good chance at being quite good at. Source: I am quite good at Mechabellum, and people often tell me my gaming skills are roughly that of a shaking, wounded reindeer. In those exact words.

This is no doubt largely down to the fact that Mechabellum doesn’t require the absurd reaction skills of a traditional RTS, because your mechs do all the battling for you, automatically. I believe I’ll call it an ‘autobattler’, then. Yes. One of my finer inventions, that. Your job, then, is to choose which robots you want, where you want them, and which upgrades you’ll give them to make sure they absolutely trounce your opponent’s.

The sensation of playing Mechabellum is similar to a tug of war. Both sides have access to the exact same stuff, so the name of the game is finding the weaker parts of your opponent’s battle lines. Maybe they’ve over-invested in swarm units on one side, so you plonk down a few anti-swarm toasters. You open up an entire flank, through which you can get to their power generators, severely weakening the rest of their force. It’s a heady, deeply satisfying chess game for people that think snipey robots are cooler than bishops, which is everyone I want to be friends with. I love it. It has cost me hours of my life. I will give it many hours more.

Head back to the advent calendar to open another door!