Metal Wolf Chaos XD

My first hour with Metal Wolf Chaos XD had me convinced I'd stumbled onto something genuinely special. You play as President Michael Wilson, pilot of the titular war mech, blasting your way across a coup-ravaged America city by city while Vice President Richard Hawk monologues at you from atop the military-industrial complex. The premise is Japan's fever-dream interpretation of American heroism, and it commits to that bit with a deadpan sincerity that almost nothing in gaming matches. The over-the-top English voice acting, the DNN propaganda broadcasts spinning your mech rampage as terrorism, the codec-style radio chatter erupting in random syllables - this is absurdist theatre at a pitch that most comedic games only aspire to. The mechanical foundation is a stage-based third-person mech shooter. Each mission drops you into a destructible environment with a list of primary targets to obliterate. Your mech carries up to eight weapons across two arm-mounted racks, swappable on the fly, and the roster is wide: machine guns, shotguns, flamethrowers, grenade launchers, railguns, cluster missile launchers, and more. Dashing through infantry to flatten them and ground-pounding into hardened targets adds a kinetic layer on top of the shooting. Between missions you spend earned currency and scrap metal to research and manufacture new weapons, which creates a genuine progression loop - though the game quietly punishes players who sprint through without grinding. Dead-end weapon trees are a real problem, and going into the late game without a reliable pair of machine guns is, bluntly, a bad time. Here is where the honeymoon ends. Metal Wolf Chaos XD is the same game it was in 2004, and General Arcade's remaster made no effort to modernise its structure. There are no mid-mission checkpoints. Some boss attacks are one-shot kills. The mouse controls on PC pass input through what feels like a joystick filter, making keyboard-and-mouse play a friction exercise. The audio mixing is a separate disaster - sound effects routinely drown out dialogue and music alike, which is painful given that the campy voice acting is the game's single greatest asset. Mission variety is thin: destroy all primary structures, rescue the occasional hostage, repeat. By the third act that loop has revealed its ceiling. The critical consensus at a 65 Metacritic lands about where it deserves to. Reviewers who came in cold on the legend were often disappointed; those who met the game halfway - or who have a tolerance for the rhythm of old-school 6th-gen action titles - walked away charmed. It genuinely is unlike anything else, and historians of FromSoftware's catalogue will find it a fascinating piece of the puzzle: this is the studio that made Armored Core learning to inject American comic-book maximalism into mech design, laying framework that would echo forward into later entries in that series. That context adds flavour, but it doesn't fix the repetitive mission objectives or the cluttered HUD. Who should play it? Anyone who treats "so bad it's brilliant" as a legitimate genre, fans of games like Earth Defense Force who want a shorter, weirder cousin, and FromSoftware completionists. Who should skip it? Players who expect a remaster to sand down rough edges - this one didn't. If you can accept a six-to-eight hour campaign that rides almost entirely on the back of its gonzo premise, Metal Wolf Chaos XD delivers exactly what the legend promised, no more and no less.

Alex · Scout Team

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