Gear Up

Competitive play with customizable death machines has been a hit ever since giant mech suits flew at each other and cars with guns blew up entire arenas. There is a purity in this genre that Gear Up will want to accomplish for its vehicular combat mixed with robotics. Still, it will have a long way to go, as the current approved build needs more revision than its strapped together parts need a mechanic to make a functioning item.

Its cosmetic outset is going the right way, as ever since its first Alpha came out, the overall has received a lot of polish with soft pastel colors, shader effects and much more lighting details. Environments are a clean mix of cut, angular structures and lightly bumped sand landscapes. There are just enough contrasts for it not to look too bland with its softness. There is room for improvement still, but this, as a basis, is definitely solid enough. Vehicle models get a similar treatment, but with more prioritized detail, which also fit adequately with any part assembled to them.

Before running into a match, players can build a tank from a selection of parts. These consist of movement, armor, weaponry and auxiliary. There are tires, giant balls and spider legs to get around, while weapons range to anywhere from rockets to lasers. From the first Alpha builds, it seemed like they had a ton of variety in place to balance matches. Sadly, this has been stripped since Gear Up has been approved on Steam for early access. Now, it requires purchase for any customization. That’s fine; but for that money, the game better work. Sadly, it doesn’t.

It looks slick though, so pretty.

Starting any match against players or even launching the game is always a small adventure, as crashes occur not so much periodically as they are a certainty. Instability makes this game nigh unplayable, though it is competent otherwise. Players drop out constantly, which makes matches short lived. Customizing controls is a futile effort, as they revert once the game crashes and it will crash. Pressing the wrong keys or combinations might freeze up the game. There is a long list why this game isn’t ready enough for any purchase yet; not even an early buy-in. So, it’s full disclosure time: This preview is written with 65 minutes on the clock, with probably over half of those spent in frozen screens. Apparently, it’s possible to only have 65 minutes with a few hundreds of launches. Other impressions were made during recent matches with very limited gameplay, as early builds with open customization were even worse than those noted now.

So, is this game a bust? Maybe it is, but not just yet. Once the game runs for a minute, there is a rudimentary quality that is decent enough to pick up and play. Vehicles move around with the appropriate weight setting and react to physics, which can offer several layers of skills, as mobile ball-operated tanks are much tougher to handle than just wheels. Controls behave smoothly and aiming adds a slight bounce to simulate rotation resistance. There are touches of design know-how spread throughout the development process of Gear Up, but as with any indie title, its optimization is its lowest point. Unfortunately, in this multiplayer game, it’s so far over the limit that no one would enjoy playing it in its current state.

It almost seems insulting to ask money for an unplayable game, but hopefully Gear Up will make up in stability what it already gained in more visual details. Then, it can charge for its gameplay and simple competitive schemes of building vehicles and blasting the crap out of each other. For now though, it should’ve done the right thing and waited it out.