A giant robot game you say? From Japan you say? What a concept!
What sets this game apart from others of its ilk is the fact that you don’t actually pilot your mech. Instead you control it like a ten-story remote controlled marionette of clumsy, unwieldy death. First, you move your human avatar to a safe location from which you can see the battle (with a helpful jetpack that allows you to leap tall buildings in a single bound). Then, you control your mech from the vantage point you’ve moved your character to.
This has the benefit of conveying a tremendous sense of scale. The battles look like the ground level perspective shots of a Godzilla movie. However, controlling your giant robot remotely from the roof of a distant building makes for very inaccurate controls. Be prepared to miss a lot or accidentally take out buildings (which you are financially penalized for).
Money earned at the end of missions (along with bonuses for saving important structures) is used to purchase both character and mech upgrades.
Now for the downsides. The graphics are under-detailed, but in spite of this the game suffers from major framerate issues. Also, the game has -insansely- poor voice acting. The vocals range from laughably poor to nearly unintelligible. Some of the actors (the female newscaster in particular) sounds as though they barely understand English and are reading their lines phonetically.
For the bargain price that you can undoubtedly find this game for, it’s not a bad buy if you want a truly unique mech game.