TINY METAL: Full Metal Rumble Review for Nintendo Switch

Tiny Metal: Full Metal Rumble by developer AREA 35, Inc., on Unreal Engine, is quite the interesting game. It’s another strategy RPG, focusing on a bevy of characters fighting in a globe-spanning war. Now, I’m not a huge fan of the genre, but there are exceptions to every rule. Last year I took a look at Exordor, which was a rather fun game in spite of some rough patches, so could this game be just as good? Let’s see.

Upon booting up the game, several modes are available, including Meta (settings to adjust game speed, showing battles and grid, auto movement and dialogue, and an option for color blindness), a shop to buy new vehicles and a place to display them, a sound test feature, and a guide on the different enemies and vehicles in the game, online multiplayer, a free battle menu against CPUS with adjustable difficulty and challenges, and story mode. The game takes place on an open hub, where you can move around by plane or car to different missions and glowing spots to collect items and even music. This dynamic feel to the hub makes it interesting to explore and find every nook and cranny by switching between vehicles, which I appreciate. Every mission has 3 optional objectives, such as not letting troops die, not letting the days go too far, etc., and I always enjoyed going out of my way to complete all of them on the hardest difficulty, which progressively gets more challenging and requires you to learn the map and use all the buildings at your disposal.

In terms of the presentation, the graphics in-game look pretty good and colorful, with a variety of environments like snowy mountains, lakes, deserts, and grassy fields. The dialogue scenes are presented as exchanges with character portraits, which are rather static with only the mouths moving. This is admittedly is a bit awkward, and the portraits with their white outlines are a bit rough, but the portraits are nicely drawn at least. The music is pretty good, pumping you up for an epic showdown against the enemy forces with its dire tone and underlying percussion. Voice acting is pretty solid, but not especially noteworthy. A notable thing is that pretty much all the lines are voice acted, which is nice.

You take command of Nathan, head of the Artemisian Army seeking to defend his land while also expanding on other kingdoms as part of his military efforts. You can also use certain skills with him, such as passive abilities, super powers to provide some buff for a limited time, and Ultra Powers gotten from charging the Super Power bar even further, which are just better versions of Super Powers. The gameplay consists of summoning infantry units to move across a grid to attack the enemy stronghold and destroy it to win, while being mindful of the terrain changes which can alter how you move along them. You can also summon different types of soldiers with different effects, movement types, and HP, which helps considering a unit’s power is based on HP. There are three difficulties at the start, with hardest unlocked after beating hard. The main enemy is the Dinoldan Army from long ago, and all your player characters are cooperating to stop them. In battle, you can attack enemies, assault them for less damage and push them off their square, lock onto them with several units to focus fire for higher damage, and counterattack when enemies attack your units. You capture buildings by placing infantry on them for several turns, after which you can produce more units for a certain amount of cash you get per day, and you win by accomplishing the main objective, usually defeating all the enemies or capturing a specific point. They do mix it up, though, by having different types of terrain and buildings to capture to spawn more troops. Overall, the system works well, but I do wish that the damage scaling on you was a bit more lenient, seeing as you do little damage to enemies. You can increase the damage by attacking from the trees, or using the lock-on mechanic to have multiple units fire on a single target, but these options generally leave you exposed to heavy damage of your own.

Overall, I enjoyed Tiny Metal: Full Metal Rumble. It doesn’t do much to stand out in its genre, but it has a nice presentation, solid gameplay mechanics, an OK story, and plenty of content to chew on. It’s about 15 dollars on Nintedo Switch and Steam, which I think is a fair price point for the amount of content it offers, even if the genre isn’t my cup of tea personally.

8/10

Check Out the Tiny Metal: Full Metal Rumble Video: