One of my favorite series is Earth Defense Force, a franchise that has barely advanced graphically since the PS3 era but makes up for it with tons of charm and high-flying explosions. When Custom Mech Wars seemed to be a fusion of EDF-style massive explosions and giant robots, I couldn't have been more excited. It felt like a match made in heaven. Unfortunately, this first attempt shows that sometimes a surefire idea isn't enough.

The premise behind Custom Mech Wars is straightforward in the most charming way. A comet is heading for Earth, forcing most of humanity into shelters to avoid the dangerous aftereffects. General work is done by automated G-Mechs. You play as a member of a small organization devoted to maintaining the G-Mechs via piloting your own non-AI G-Mech. Of course, the G-Mechs inexplicably start acting out of control, and as one of the few people on Earth trained in piloting giant robots, you must battle laser-spewing death machines instead of working on Excel sheets. Honestly? It's a trade-up.

The star of Custom Mech Wars is the ability to create your own robot. The system to create robots is incredibly easy to use but pleasantly diverse. Basically, every robot has only one requirement: legs. These can be anything from normal bipedal legs to tank treads to commuter trains, but they're the only required part. From there, you can attach arms, bodies, heads, additional legs, or more at the touch of a button, with most parts having several snap-to points where you can attach more parts. You can make a mech with five heads and a pair of legs, or an Ashura-style multi-armed beast, or even one that is just a tank cannon attached to a train.

Likewise, weapons can be tossed on generally at will. Some weapons have requirements, like a melee weapon forcing you to have a specific kind of arms to hold it, but you can make a square covered with bazookas if you want. There are also accessories to further customize your robot by adding anything from horns to wings to light-up flashing lights that you can turn on and off. As with the rest of the mech creation, this is all snap-and-play, which makes it nicely accessible.

Custom Mech Wars' mech creation is fun and allows you to create a shockingly diverse selection of robots from a relatively small number of parts. By requiring you just to use legs, rather than a torso or head, it opens up the flexibility to create some truly surreal and bizarre creations. You can make a train car that runs around on human-looking legs with a tank cannon for a head, or a rolling ball with guns taped to every available surface. It's very easy to use, once you get past some awkward explanations.

The problem is that the fun ends once you get bored with the mech creator. While it's super neat to have a robust and easy-to-use mech creation sandbox, the gameplay doesn't match up. I really wanted to like this, as I'm usually easy to please when it comes to this sort of thing, but the end result doesn't hit the mark.

Combat is simple in that you pilot your mech and shoot things. The basic controls are familiar, with the mecha-game design of movement, jumping and a gauge-limited boost to get around. Depending on how you build your robot, you can spend more time on the ground or in the air, but thankfully, movement is smooth, and it's easy to control your robot no matter how absurd it is.

Weaponry is divided into main weapons, auto-firing weapons, melee weapons and sub/lock-on weapons. You choose which weapons are assigned to each group (some are locked to certain groups, though), and all will fire at once when you press the respective buttons. If you equip 10 machine guns, all 10 will fire with every press of the main weapon button. You have the ability to assign certain weapons to your critical button instead. Weapons have ammunition, so it's generally wise to wield your high-ammo weaker weapons with the main weapon button while saving an area-of-effect nuke for the critical button.

Instead of a standard health bar, you have health bars for all parts, and taking too much damage in a part can destroy it and any attached weaponry. You can help prevent this by making sure those parts have additional armor pieces or plates, but it also means you need to be careful about how you distribute your weaponry. If you make a machine lined with guns on both arms and lose an arm, your machine loses most of its killing power. It's not worth stressing about, but it does add an interesting wrinkle.

You can also hop out of your robot, which serves a few purposes. If your robot goes down in battle, you can summon one of the other robots you've built to replace it (or swap one robot for another), so if you survive long enough, being knocked down doesn't mean you're out of the fight. You can also use a limited-ammo bazooka to "capture" enemies, which seems to drastically increase the chance of getting good parts from them. There are also certain objects in the environment you can trigger to do things like lure in enemies or blast them with turrets.

That's basically Custom Mech Wars in a nutshell. You fight wave after wave of enemies, blowing them to pieces and collecting their precious loot so you can further upgrade your robot to blow up more enemies. On paper, it's an absolutely fantastic idea, and I can imagine someone having fun with it if all they want to do is smash robots with bigger robots, but I think it misses some of the charm that kept me returning to titles like Earth Defense Force.

The major problem I have with Custom Mech Wars is that it doesn't feel like it has the same sense of insane scale and ramping up as Earth Defense Force. It does have some sense of scaling with bigger enemies and fancier weapons, but it doesn't feel the same. Too much time is spent mowing down interchangeable robots in comparison to EDF, which starts you with ants bigger than a bus and goes up from there. In EDF, I was constantly excited to see what new absurdity I was going to face, while in Custom Mech Wars, it's difficult to not get bored. I don't think it needs to be Armored Core 6, but it could go a lot further.

It also suffers from the fact that there are other games you can get for the same cost (or less) that look better while doing the same thing. In the big leagues, Gundam Breaker 3 or even the much weaker New Gundam Breaker offer a mecha building system that's almost as good but has much more engaging "smash a bunch of stuff for parts" gameplay and overall visuals. Even indie titles like M.A.S.S. Builder give you all of Custom Mech Wars' strengths with none of its weaknesses.

It also doesn't help that the game doesn't look good. The mech animations look absurdly unimpressive, so most of the mechs look like the cheap plastic toys from a dollar store vending machine. That's kind of fitting at times but drags down the fun of trying to create something super cool. EDF isn't exactly a graphical powerhouse, but it usually took advantage of simple character models to make the excess shine. In comparison, Custom Mech Wars puts so much emphasis on creating your own robot that it's a letdown when it looks dull in action. Coming out the same year as something like Armored Core 6 does the title no favors, but it would struggle when compared to similar titles that are a decade older.

I really wanted to love Custom Mech Builder. Earth Defense Force and customizable giant robots is everything I should want. Alas, Custom Mech Builder doesn't have much going for it. If you like creating giant anime robots to smash enemies, there are better choices. If you like over-the-top explosion-fests, there are better options. Pretty much the only thing Custom Mech Builder has going for it is how easy it is to make a bullet train with drill arms, but that amusement quickly wears out its welcome. As a budget $20 title, Custom Mech Wars might be worth the cost for the amusing builder, but mech fans can find better games that cost less.

Score: 6.5/10