After over 3 years, Starcraft still occasionally pokes its resilient RTS head into the best-selling lists. Dozens of games have come and gone without successfully recreating the perfect balance of gameplay, story, complexity and features of that classic. With Metal Fatigue, Psygnosis is trying to make some inroads into Blizzard's long held territory, and what better way to do it with than giant robots!

Metal Fatigue has all the standard real-time-strategy elements: build buildings which in turn produce units/vehicles which in turn go out and whack the enemies' units and buildings. A time-tested formula, but the developers do throw in their little twists. MF has a "prebuild" mode where you can spend your development points instantly, putting up initial buildings and creating initial units. This allows the player to get past the sometimes tedious tasks at the beginning of any level. From there the mission begins, with, once again, the standard range of variety: Destroy an enemy base, recover some data, patrol the area, etc. The single player campaign is presented in a very "Starcraftesque" manner: three different campaign chapters, each varying in difficulty, which feature you controlling the exploits of one of the three brothers the story circles around.

These brothers each have found their way into the services of competing "corpo-nations," who are warring to gain a leg up in technology which will allow them to dominate the others. Your available hardware includes the standard fare of factories, research centers, tanks, rocket launchers, missile defense posts, and harvesting and repair vehicles; but the centerpiece of the game is the combots. These are "Gundam" or "Robotech" style fighting robots, with mix and match arms, bodies, and legs. Mount up those rocket launcher pants or the giant battle axe arm and let's fight. Just one of these babies can take on a whole mess of tanks and artillery and slice them to shreds, so ultimately the fight comes down to combot on combot. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of strategy that goes in the fight, but they are fun to watch. That may be the lowpoint of Metal Fatigue: the strategy. The AI is nothing impressive so your missions consist mainly of determining the proper use of your resources to make an effective fighting force and then charging away. The word on the Net is that the AI cheats (tracking your movement and building units at a different rate than you) in order to be competitive. This is disappointing, but hey, you still get to watch giant robots fight!

The designers did an excellent job with their 3D engine. The standard camera view is 3/4 overhead, but you can smoothly rotate, zoom in and out, and tilt the view angle allowing for total control. The 3D terrain takes into account line-of-site, and height advantages and is an excellent mesh of the isometric Starcraft look, and a full 3D game like Warcraft III. I never was frustrated with my view or felt like I needed to screw around too much to get where I wanted to be.

Overall, Metal Fatigue is a nice game. It is not remarkably innovative, but it has those nice touches and brings enough new to the table to make it a good addition to the genre.

Install: Easy. A full install takes 400megs, and I had no problems getting the game up and running. CDcheck is required.

Gameplay: 7. Easy to get into and control. Changing views is really nice and smooth. Fighting not terribly strategic, however.

Graphics: 8. The 3-D world is well done and performs nicely even on lower end computers. The higher options look great. Would have liked to see more variety in landscapes, and perhaps some more color over all.

Sound: 7. Adequate.

Difficulty: 7. The campaigns progress reasonably well, and your skill should increase as does the challenge. Well balanced.

Concept: 7. Not remarkably novel, but there is plenty of mileage left in the RTS world and the unique features of the combots in MF warrant a look.

Multiplayer: Supported with up to 8 players. Cooperative or deathmatch.

Overall: 7. Need an RTS fix? Giant Fighting Robot fan? Look no further.