Mech Engineer’s demo is for people who love hateful interface design

If you heard loud swearing last night in the Watford area it may have been one of two things: 1) me cussing out my (borrowed) Steam Deck while stealthily accessing the wifi from outside a closed public library, as I don’t currently have broadband at home, or 2) me subsequently trying to make head or tail of Mech Engineer, in which you take charge of a mobile undersea metropolis and send squads of painstakingly assembled robosoldiers to semi-auto-battle squidgy alien fauna.

Engineering a mech is a Herculean labour whose completion eludes today’s puny scientists, and Mech Engineer doesn’t aim to make life easier, whatever its putative status as a “means of fun”. Mech Engineer is a game with an attitude problem, frankly. I realised this on in-game day two, when the interface coughed up a bunch of damage reports presented as pieces of paper, which I then had to crumple up and toss away individually.

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