Galahad 3093 Review – Unreal Steel, with a Few Caveats

Galahad 3093, the newest mech PvP hero shooter title from developer Simutronics, launched into Steam Early Access on September 1. In the genre largely saturated, and died down as Overwatch itself started wasting away, Galahad 3093 offers something fresh for those itching to get into some hero shooter action. The main draw of the game is mechs, armored-hulking scraps of metal that can output tons of firepower and dish out serious damage. Fans of the mech genre have been wanting for years now for a proper return to its golden era, where Armored Core and its successors reigned supreme.

It's safe to say that whether you’re a fan of hero shooters or mechs, Galahad 3093 has something very decent to offer. However, it also falls into several familiar and very debilitating pitfalls, which could ultimately kill its potential down the road unless the developer addresses them.

At the time of its release, Galahad 3093 offers only two multiplayer modes and a training mode where players can learn the basics. The basics are simple enough to understand: you pilot a mech called Lance equipped with up to four weapons at a time, and the Lance can either be of four different archetypes, ranging from the lightest and speediest to the heaviest and bulkiest in terms of armor.

Lances can whiz around the battlefield with built-in thrusters and jump across uneven terrain. There’s also a dedicated special jump jet button that launches your Lance at an alarmingly high altitude. I say “alarmingly” because it really is a cause for alarm sometimes; you can barely control your Lance in the air during a jump jet, so you are very much open to attacks or hitting uneven terrain, which can cause you to get stuck.

Gameplay-wise, Galahad 3093 plays on noticeably longer rounds, thanks to the Lances’ overall movement speed and other various aspects. Winning a round depends on reducing the enemy team’s points to zero by capturing and holding bases across the map. This is where players will notice a huge imbalance within the game’s design. Killing an enemy Lance takes off one point from their overall 40 points or so; this means that if there’s a kill feeder within your team, you will probably lose even if you’re doing a much better job of capturing and defending points.

Lances are also very heavily tilted in favor of fast-moving brawler mechs rather than long-ranged ones, thanks to the game actively handicapping them. Thanks to meta-slaves and the small number of players, newbies will find themselves actively ganged up on and feeding if they ever choose to pick Lances optimized for range.

The Lance tier system is also something that needs to be extensively overhauled. At the time of writing, Galahad 3093 has five tiers of mechs, and you work your way up from Tier 1 to Tier 5. However, due to how the upgrades and points work, there is no meaning to dumping your points to any tier in between since Tier 5 is massively overpowered in terms of what it offers. You’ll find that the most effective players in the game will only rush specific modules to Tier 5 and skip everything else, as lower tiers are basically useless.

All of that said, Galahad 3093 can certainly be enjoyable at times. Moving around in a mech that’s highly customizable and tailored to your wants and needs is a sealed deal for those who enjoy mech titles. If you play with a crew that communicates effectively and has enough knowledge, you will probably enjoy this game and not notice some of its flaws. The art and sound design are on-point for a grounded and gritty mech title, and the performance is mostly stable on PC with very few hiccups here and there.

Overall

Galahad 3093 is a hard game to recommend outright due to some glaring flaws here and there, but I’ve enjoyed my time with it overall. The game is catered toward hardcore players who’ll stick around to find the balances and intricacies of a proper mech hero shooter, but with polarizing systems in place, these same players may experience conniptions somewhere along the line. As an early access title, Galahad 3093 is a great proof of concept for a halfway decent hero shooter. If developer Simutronics could work out the kinks and imbalances in the game, the title could be a sleeper hit within a smaller yet very passionate and devoted community.