Mechabellum Season 2 brings a square-jawed Sergeant specialist who’s definitely seen things no man should see

How would a younger me react to the concept of game seasons? "Leave me alone, please. I’m busy replaying The Suffering 2 for the sixth time to see a new 15 second cutscene that recognises which combination of morally aligned beginnings and endings I’ve picked. It reads your save from the first game and everything!". Say ‘memory card’ to a youthful, broccoli-maned Fortnite enjoyer nowadays. Go on, I dare you. You’ll be in a home before you know it.

Still, having new toys at regular intervals is one real upshot of our new live-service barrage of ephemeral novelty, perpetually flung at my dizzy eyeballs like gleaming carnival daggers at exhausted spinning wheels. Especially if they’re for the exquisite strategy of Mechabellum. Season 2 released yesterday alongside patch 1.2, bringing with it a new unit and specialist, some reworks, and lots of cosmetic bits I pretend not to care about but then get excited when I unlock a new one.

The new unit is the Raiden, a giant flyer that fires three bolts of lightning at once at different targets. It’s good at fighting medium units. There are also reworks for the Sabertooth (new model, a new tech) and the Overlord, which is now “larger, stronger, and more expensive”. Death Knell is a new, scarier version of my beloved large laser boy Melting Point, but is only available in the Brawl and Survival modes, which I don’t play. An actual, tangible tactical thought I often have in Mechabellum when considering my formation is "it needs more pew!", so I might have to branch out.

Image credit: Game River

But the star of the show is surely the new specialist, mostly because of how utterly haunted he looks from his years of service in the mechanised forever wars. The Intensive Training Expert gets an extra 50 supplies in the first round, plus a free intensive training upgrade. That’s the one that levels up a unit. In part, Mechabellum is a game of deciding how much time to dedicate catching up and responding to your opponent’s specific chain of cascading power spikes, so I’m interested to see how much this deeply troubled war bastard will affect things.

Here’s my review of Mechabellum, which I slapped a Bestest Best on. Here’s the paragraph I feel sums the game up best:

Its truest joys lie in wanton destruction; so unbelievably tactile for a game in which not a single shell casing is spent without minutes between the locked-in trigger pull and muzzle flare’s crescendo. Watching for weak spots, applying the thriftiest dash of pressure without overextending, and watching entire flanks crumble as several rounds of planning pay off - planning that might just have looked like panicked flailing to your opponent. Having the merest snack-sized premonition of a hunch vindicated as you scry the patterns in your foe’s placement, and having already answered their plan with a hearty “not today, fucko” before they’ve even got close to pulling it off.

Fun robots big. Big robots fun.