Wild Metal
- January 01, 2000 00:00 AM PST
Life as a bounty hunter treading across alien landscapes battling heavily armored enemies to retake planets for the human race has never been as boring as it is in Wild Metal, a sparse and drab tank battle game for the Dreamcast with very little action or diversity.
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There Is Metal, But It Ain't Wild
In Wild Metal, you battle to reclaim the future of mankind, choosing from five armored attack vehicles to explore, fight and reclaim eight lost power cores on each of the twenty-one mountainous levels. With massive environments and non-linear gameplay, it would seem that Wild Metal could be an exciting Dreamcast action game, but unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth.
Wild Metal combines a difficult to understand navigation system, mundane and repetitive landscapes, and truly bizarre physics (which can possibly be blamed on the alien planets) with horrible camera angles (for which there is no excuse). The game leaves you underwhelmed at the beginning and gets even less impressive as it goes on. Once you've seen one level, you've pretty much seen them all, leaving you little motivation for continuing on through the game.
Bland, Barely There And Bad
The only way Wild Metal really uses the graphical power of the Dreamcast is to create the enormous levels you have to explore. But the boring textures and the sloth-like progress you make driving the tanks make seeing anything interesting (like an enemy or a power core) very rare indeed. None of the vehicle models, enemy or otherwise, are anything exceptional and neither are the explosions or lamely colorful lighting effects. Overall, it's just boring.
There's not much to say about Wild Metal's sound; it's supposed to give you a sense of space and location, but since the only thing you ever hear is your tank treads rolling, along with an occasional explosion or helicopter flying by, there's not really anything to hear.
Control is a frustrating grab bag of trying to keep the camera behind you at the proper angle so you can see up or down, and trying to keep your tank from flipping over on the undulations in the landscape. Then all that's left is the frustration of getting your turret to point the right way at the right angle to actually hit something.
There's No Intelligent Life Out There After All
Wild Metal is boring to look at, difficult to control and hardly makes a sound. It just doesn't have anything going for it, except maybe the anticipation that it could have been a much-needed fun action game for the Dreamcast. But it isn't.
