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I was recently invited to preview Bandai Namco’s upcoming SD Gundam game, SD Gundam Battle Alliance, which will be released in August 2022. The game feels like a tribute to classic storylines in a world where the Mobile Suit Gundam timeline has been tampered with.
Mobile suits appear where they shouldn’t be, so players must launch and set things right. The action feels sharp, and the attention to detail regarding Mobile Suit Gundam felt perfect.
A demo will be available this Friday for fans interested and own a PlayStation console.
SD Gundam Battle Alliance brings classic Gundam moments to life
An incredibly fun hack ‘n’ slash game, SD Gundam Battle Alliance takes place in the "G Universe," where Gundam timelines converge. I had about an hour to play the game and got through four or five stages. I love how the game begins, though.
As an unnamed Federation Pilot during the One Year War of Mobile Suit Gundam, it takes place around the time of Operation Odessa. Fans of Mobile Suit Gundam will recognize this stage when Ramba Ral made his guerilla attack on the White Base.
Instead of Ramba Ral’s Gouf showing up, ASW-G-08 Gundam Barbatos showed up! Thanks to time distortion, Gundam Barbatos arrived, and the player had to deal with them instead.
Barbatos is sent back to its own time, and that’s when the plot begins unfolding. Several Gundam timelines have been corrupted, and it’s up to the player to put it all right again. There are so many familiar mobile suits in the game, and it filled me joyfully as a long-time Gundam fan.
Players go through two types of stages as of this writing: Story Missions and Break Missions. The Story Missions are the correct historical representations of Gundam stories, and Break Missions are stages where time is fractured, and things aren’t what they seem.
What is combat like in SD Gundam Battle Alliance?
At first, I thought it might control like a Musou game, and while it is similar, this is not a one vs. 1000 game. It’s more like a traditional hack ‘n’ slash or beat them up, with a manageable amount of foes. While it's a simple system, it offers great depth.
Each mobile suit has a basic attack. Strong attacks can dodge, jump and dash. They can guard, fire a ranged attack, and have two special attacks. Each of the non-basic/strong attacks has ammo that needs to refill after being used as cooldowns. This allowed mobile suits to have familiar, powerful attacks while not making them spammable.
The mobile suits also have a finishing attack determined by a meter that fills up as the player defeats foes. Many mobile suits have useful ranged attacks, which is great because enemy mobile suits come from nowhere. They pop up on cliffs, behind cover, or fly in.
That was perhaps one of my favorite things about the game, the battlegrounds had enemies showing up in places they would have in the respective anime or during a real battle. It made sense and offered a bit of an exciting challenge.
The only real problem I had was that it felt a bit quirky to switch targets, and I was expecting regular and strong attacks to combine, but that was my preconception from playing Musou games. It felt good, but I would have loved them to create awesome combos.
Customization and unlocking new suits felt solid overall
It’s essential to have many different mobile suits for variety in gameplay. After completing certain conditions, players unlock more mobile suits and can also unlock skills to equip their suits.
In addition, players can use Capital to upgrade the stats of mobile suits. This is one of the things that can unlock more mobile suits. Increasing the level of some mobile suits will unlock more for pilots in the SD Gundam Battle Alliance. I appreciate being able to add things like faster reload time, more melee damage, and things of that nature to make a mobile suit play as much as I want it to.
How does SD Gundam Battle Alliance look and feel?
The game is gorgeous for a Super Deformed game. The pilots looked amazing, and while the mobile suits are SD. They are recreated with incredible attention to detail. The iconic mobile suits looked exactly like I remember - smaller and cuter.
Perhaps my favorite thing about the aesthetic is the music. Gundam Wing's “Just Communication,” MSG’s “Ai Senshi,” and many of the classic combat themes from the anime were playing while I fought. The nostalgia was real, but the rest of the game felt just as good.
In conclusion
The gameplay is relatively simple, and I look forward to co-op gameplay in it. This is partly because AI isn’t always where I want them to be. They wander off and do something else in a heated battle, and I’m left holding the proverbial bag.
The combat and overall gameplay of SD Gundam Battle Alliance is easy to get into and fun, and it nails the overall aesthetic of SD Gundam. The lore is accurate, the music’s great, and it looks like it will have plenty of replay value. It’s a beautiful game, and as a hardcore Mobile Suit Gundam fan, it’s exactly what I was hoping it would be.
Bandai Namco revealed SD Gundam Battle Alliance will release on August 25, 2022, for the Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (Steam).
