Mech Engineer's demo is for people who love hateful interface design
If you heard loud swearing last night in the Watford area it may have been one of two things: 1) me cussing out my (borrowed) Steam Deck while stealthily accessing the wifi from outside a closed public library, as I don't currently have broadband at home, or 2) me subsequently trying to make head or tail of Mech Engineer, in which you take charge of a mobile undersea metropolis and send squads of painstakingly assembled robosoldiers to semi-auto-battle squidgy alien fauna.
Engineering a mech is a Herculean labour whose completion eludes today's puny scientists, and Mech Engineer doesn't aim to make life easier, whatever its putative status as a "means of fun". Mech Engineer is a game with an attitude problem, frankly. I realised this on in-game day two, when the interface coughed up a bunch of damage reports presented as pieces of paper, which I then had to crumple up and toss away individually.
That interface! There's an innocent 30 seconds initially when you think it's just badly designed. But then you realise that it is a creature of foul and labyrinthine purpose. Broadly, it consists of a Dwarf Fortressy grid-based world map, where you can shunt your city about and send mech squads on missions, with tabs for researching new components, fabricating them, and assembling them into conveniently coffin-sized Gundams you can then fill with pilots. There's a calendar which lets you advance to the next day. Reading those sentences back, it sounds practically transparent. Like XCOM but with extra robots, right? Wrong! Mech Engineer is nothing like XCOM. It is like tying your shoelaces with a pair of scissors. It is like doing jigsaw puzzles in a cesspit after the death of the sun.
When I mentioned Mech Engineer to Graham he said it reminded him of MicroProse's older interface 'em ups, in which the thrill arises from the quasi-analog, high-fidelity obfuscatoriness of the simulation itself. I subsequently went away and discovered that yes, MicroProse is Mech
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