Mech Mechanic Simulator is a PlayWay joint, and it shows. PlayWay publish games like House Flipper and Car Mechanic Simulator, and if you’ve played or seen them, you know what to expect with this upcoming, scifi variant. The same as the others – but with mechs! That is to say, the same as the others, but better. There’s a trailer below, and a demo on Steam that I’ve had a play with.
My four-year-old kid has a bunch of iPad apps in which he taps and swipes on wounded animals in order to pluck thorns, wrap their scratches in gauze, and comb their hair. Mech Mechanic Simulator isn’t too far off that.
In first-person, you walk around a vaguely futuristic garage, take on jobs to fix mechs, scan them to spot broken parts, and then click, click, and drag to remove its parts one by one. Screws and bolts and wires need to be removed before you can remove the panels, panels need to be removed before you can remove the pneumatic pistons, and you keep going until you find the part that’s in need of repair or replacing. Then to put it back together again.
It’s simple, repetitive, has a terrible framerate, is scored with generic rock music, and has an irritating “comedy” robot who makes one of six available quips every 15 seconds on a loop. I don’t hate it. Turn off its audio, put on a podcast, and it’s a fairly relaxing and methodical way to spend time with some mechs. I say this as someone who bought a Gundam kit last year in a desperate attempt to develop some sort of lockdown hobby, and spent a perfectly pleasant three evenings snapping its tiny pieces together. We grow older, but we don’t really change, eh.
There’s a bunch of other stuff going on in Mech Mechanic including a shop with hundreds of items and some sort of fluctuating economy, jobs of varying difficulty, and so on, but I didn’t see enough in an hour to know how the experience might change over the long haul. I played enough to know that I want a game like this, but maybe not like this.
You can grab said demo for yourself from Steam. Polyslash (its developer and publisher, who are majority owned by PlayWay) say there’s a more robust ‘Prologue’ release planned, and the game itself is listed as “almost done”.