Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner Mars

My first time back inside Jehuty's cockpit in years, and the thing that surprised me most is how little anything else has filled the gap. Mech action games in the style of Zone of the Enders are genuinely rare in 2024, and The 2nd Runner MARS makes that vacuum obvious the moment you're darting between enemies, lobbing homing lasers from a distance and snapping into melee range to slice through Orbital Frames with a sword that appears almost by reflex. The combat loop is fast, spatial, and built around a lock-on system that keeps the chaos readable. You grab enemies and throw them into each other. You chain burst attacks, shield, boost-dodge, and swap between special abilities that expand over the course of the campaign. It clicks in a way that very few third-person action games do, and the smoothness of movement has genuinely aged better than most of its PS2-era competition. The MARS remaster brings native 4K support and optional VR via Oculus Rift and HTC Vive on PC. The VR implementation is interesting rather than essential. The whole game is playable in VR with a new cockpit UI that places you inside Jehuty looking out, and the sense of scale when enemy mechs loom up close is legitimately impressive. The lock-on focus and smooth locomotion mean motion sickness is less of a concern than you might expect in a game this frenetic. The compromises are real though: cutscenes drop to a flat virtual screen rather than playing in full VR, melee combat can disorient the camera, and range judgment suffers a bit when you lose the third-person perspective. Worth trying if you have a headset, but the flat 4K version is the stronger overall package for most people. Where the game stumbles is everywhere it left the combat behind in 2003. The story follows ex-soldier Dingo Egret, a reluctant pilot who finds Jehuty buried on one of Jupiter's moons and gets pulled into a war against the BAHRAM military organisation. The Kojima fingerprints are all over the writing, which means wild tonal swings, a dense mythology that assumes familiarity with the first game, and voice acting that ranges from solid to flat. Coming in cold without having played the original Zone of the Enders will leave you genuinely lost at several points. The campaign itself runs around seven to eight hours with stage objectives that vary from pure combat runs to escort missions to large-scale battles where you are protecting allied units while clearing enemies, which is more variety than it sounds on paper. The PC port has attracted some complaints over the years around controller configuration and launch-era technical issues, and the absence of a Japanese audio track is a recurring gripe from series fans. At its core though, the remaster does what it sets out to do: preserves the visual style, sharpens it significantly, and keeps the combat intact. Nothing meaningful has been modernised in terms of structure or pacing, so what you are buying is the original experience with a better picture and an optional headset mode. For a niche audience that is exactly what they want. For a player expecting a rebuilt game, it will feel thin. If you have never touched the series and you enjoy fast, spatial action games with high movement freedom and no genre equivalent on the modern market, this is a genuinely good entry point despite the story confusion. If you bounced off the original or were expecting a full-ground-up remake, the value is much harder to justify. Alex, Scout Team