Meltdown Review

It is not difficult to point out the elements of Meltdown that make it fun to play — and I’ll get to it in a second. Interestingly, it is no more complicated than pointing out the ones making it slightly frustrating and awkward to play. After all, Meltdown is about shooting stuff that is shooting back at you, but in quite a simplistic way. It is strange that I say this, because there are plenty of mechanics to make this an interesting game to play, but ultimately, the use of them is quite limited and… pointless. Compared to how Meltdown plays out in each stage, even the overly intricate level-up systems seems to go a bit over its own head.

Not too long ago, I reviewed the Early Access version of Shadowrun: Boston Chronicles. These games are both based around the same idea. In terms of cooperative play, you can join other players’ campaigns, level up your own character and spoil yourself a bit of the story, as it’s quite likely that you aren’t as far into the campaign as the host. It worked, at least gameplay-wise, although there always was the issue of the spoilers, or repeating a level you’ve already played — which made it all feel slightly repetitive. Meltdown has little story context, which is perhaps what makes it so suitable for seamless in-and-out online plays.

Admittedly, Meltdown becomes equally repetitive, as you’ll likely find yourself forced to join other players’ campaigns to level up and be able to beat your own campaign. However, jumping into someone else’s level doesn’t entail spoiling parts of your own campaign — for a lack of a story, mainly. Usually, it’s difficult to even notice which level you’re playing, as they all share the same visual elements, environment and enemies. They’re all procedurally generated and the only consistent thing in level difficulty progression is how tough enemies are, or the number of attacking enemies at a time, which is difficult to notice at points.

In Meltdown, you are some sort of space-engineer-commando who’s tasked with cleaning up every space station where the droids in charge have gone rogue. Of course, these robots will be shooting back at you. The isometric perspective gives you quite an overview on the battlefield, which makes movement and bullet-avoidance quite important in this game, particularly when rolling, as your travel speed is rather slow. This, plus the increased damage that melee attacks do, makes it odd that one of the first things you learn to do in this game is take cover. In fact, I didn’t use cover at all after the third level, because it turned out to be counter-productive. As many enemies will get close aiming for a melee attack, you’ll often end up cornered if you don’t keep moving.

The most remarkable aspect of the mechanics is the slow levelling system, which it’s not rewarding enough to keep you engaged and give you the feeling of progression. This system forces you to play in other players’ campaigns, as the price to unlock different weapons or to level them up is way too high. This can become quite frustrating, as unlike in games like Call of Duty, it only seems the reason why you keep playing. The different abilities that you can give to your character (Medic, Soldier, and Specialist) never seem to be crucial enough to care about them, whereas the improvement of weapons is too costly, requiring two different resources to do so. All in all, for such simplistic gameplay, the upgrade system seems too obtuse, as if extracted from a F2P game.

In fact, part of this is true, as the game was originally created for iOS devices. Perhaps that’s the main reason why both graphics and gameplay lack variety, or why the gameplay itself is sometimes too clumsy. However, once enough players crowd together to beat a level, the chaos generated by the shoot’em up gameplay and the frenetic electronic music, there is quite a bit of fun hidden in this game.