The game’s audio fares a little better than the graphics, but only somewhat. The sound effects at least felt perfectly acceptable, and hearing all the weapons in my arsenal fire away is quite a satisfying experience. The game also boasts some really kick-ass cockpit ambience with the kind of blaring alarms and casual beeping noises one would expect to hear right out of an episode of Gundam. I have to hand it off to the sound designers for doing a really great job with the game’s effects, and the music definitely isn’t terrible either. Unfortunately, the game’s voice acting is very sub-par, but what annoys me even more is how little of it there is. Several times throughout the campaign I got the impression that the game couldn’t decide if it wanted to stick to subtitles or voice-overs, because I kept getting mixes of both during the various missions. Even with the poor acting though, I’d have preferred a focus on spoken dialogue over pure subtitles, simply because the game is so action-oriented that I didn’t have time to read each and every line of dialogue that popped up to fill the bottom quadrant of my screen – plus, spoken dialogue would have also meant that I wouldn’t have had to deal with the spelling errors. Gaah!

As I type this, Mech Assault 2 has gone gold and is going to be released in a rather short amount of time. With it at the forefront of Microsoft’s advertising campaign, I have to honestly ask why anybody in their right mind would pick this game up for the holiday season. I’m sorry Tecmo, but even though we mech sim fans are rather neglected and abused these days, that doesn’t mean that you can shovel out a pile of dung and expect us to start devouring it. “Unacceptable” is a label I can slap on just about every aspect of Gungriffon: Allied Strike, and while co-op play is an incredibly tempting aspect (that I, once again, really wish more developers would implement properly), the fact that this game doesn’t even seem to try in nearly every other field is something that really surprises me. Some day I’ll stop getting my hopes up about a fancy new mech game so I can quit getting kicked in the face so much, but not today, I guess.