Mechanima is an indie game created for the 4th McBacon Jam event (Didn't we just have one of these things 10 minutes ago!) Mechanima is a sci fi adventure where you play as a robot girl who is just called "The Girl" until she later renames herself Avee. You wake up with no memories and are found by some droid who seems to be very friendly towards you. You are described as being in a "desert," that seems to have some very nice tiles, but lacks in any interesting map mechanics.



The Girl, as she is called at the start, has no memories and is looking for her parents. The big reveal that she is a robot (spoilers?) occurs just a minute or two into the game. I think the building up of her being human could have been a bit longer. And her reaction to being a robot could have been a bit more... reactive.

In the town you'll walk around some very big maps. Each has one or two buildings in it. Then you can walk down the street to another big map with another big building in it. I felt a lot of "sameness" in many of these maps. Some of the interiors has some decent mapping, but the town portion felt barren.



The battle mechanics might have something to it, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't use some work. Each character has a list of special abilities that either cost MP or TP (The game calls them something else, but I'll stick with the simplified version.) Many of these specials abilities are the same on each character. You can recharge all your energy or you can reduce damage for 1 turn (only one turn, huh?) Later the game will introduce a mechanic called tactics. This makes the combat a little more interesting. You can select a tactic and it will put that command into your menu, you can then use it right away. Though I found that I went through MP and TP too quickly to really get a handle on using the tactics part of the combat. I also thought the enemies at the start of the game hit for a tad too much HP damage (and since there's no leveling up, it will take you a while to be able to afford the equipment to deal with them efficiently.)

There's actually many areas in this game you can access right away. There's a lot of mapping here. There's just very little substance going on in each map. You'll walk and walk down the street of that town and be blown away by how long that street is. And the streets are filled with enemies that are pointless to escape from (since the enemies appear on screen and approach the player so quickly you'll just end up in encounter after encounter from the same enemy sprite if you try to escape.) As the game is in a very unfinished state and could use some work I'll leave this review unrated.