There has been a recent trend amongst Japanese developers to produce games that are more tailored toward a Western audience and this title is clearly part of this movement with its focus on first person shooting and online multiplayer. Operation: Troy takes the very successful formula of EA’s Battlefield and replaces Sherman tanks with the extremely popular Mobile Suits. Theoretically this should be a match made in heaven but unfortunately the game is an archaic mess made by developers inexperienced in the genre who obviously didn’t get the support they needed to make a title that can live up to modern standards.

Set in the One Year War of the Universal Century story arc, the game offers the player two single-player campaigns where they assume the role of a soldier from either the Earth Federation or the Principality of Zeon. There is very little story in the game, what little there is being communicated through small amounts of text before, during and after missions. The campaigns last a paltry five missions each and really are just barebones training for the online mode.

Players enter battle as a lowly foot trooper picked from one of three classes: assault, sniper or anti-tank. They all have the standard weapons players expect from the classes and they function as they do in every other game. Fortunately, playing as a foot soldier is still a viable option despite the number of giant mecha roaming around the field as all of the classes have weapons that can take down the towering Mobile Suits.

The real tragedy of this game is that there is so little fun to be had in piloting the Mobile Suits. They are slow, clunky and frustrating to turn and aim with. The game’s manual purports to be “seeking military realism” and that is fine to a point, but compared to blasting round in an Armored Core mech the Mobile Suits lack the base enjoyment that piloting a war robot should have. Gone are the fast-paced fight scenes from the anime, having been replaced with clumsy combat controls and ponderous walking speeds.

The single-player levels see the player going from point to point along a path through the multiplayer levels, mostly consisting of soldier vs. soldier combat. Several of them allow the player to pilot a Mobile Suit at set points but for fans of the anime this may seem to miss the point somewhat. The draw of Gundam has always been the wonderfully designed Mobile Suits and only getting a handful of chances to pilot them through the course of the story is fairly disappointing.

The campaigns are over extremely quickly and offer no real enjoyment due to appalling AI and lifeless weaponry. The levels are also somewhat of a grind as they are overly repetitive and dull. Seeing as the only difference between fighting ground troops and Mobile Suits is that the robots don’t stand around as much, each fight plays out without much variation and leads to some of the dullest battles seen in this generation.

Whilst the multiplayer is certainly more fun in some ways than the single-player, it is still very much a case of the lesser of two evils. The game offers a choice of three modes: Conquest, Assault and Survival. Conquest is a direct lift of the classic Battlefield mode where players attempt to capture control points round a map. Assault is essentially team deathmatch with each team having a limited number of respawns and Survival is a time-based free for all deathmatch mode.

One of the most appealing parts of the multiplayer is the ability to unlock and customise Mobile Suits. Unfortunately all mech customisation will be compared to the amazing breadth of choices available in From Software’s games and Operation: Troy doesn’t manage to hold up in this regard.

Despite the Mobile Suits not being very thrilling to pilot, strafing between buildings and frantically unloading bazookas into your enemies does engender a sense of scale and action. This is especially true when you are playing as a soldier on foot and see players duking it out across the skyline of a city.

The game features some of the worst art on the Xbox 360. To the developer’s credit, they are trying to render massive battlefields from both a soldier’s eye view and from the cockpit of a mech but the bland emptiness and low resolution textures are unforgivable in today’s market.

Special mention must go to the laughable ragdoll physics used for defeated Mobile Suits. Immobilised mecha crumple and fall to the floor when they lose their health and once on the floor they lose all density and act like weightless skeletons, allowing the player to kick them around as if they weren’t several hundred tonnes of metal. This is indicative of the amount of attention given to everything else in the game as well; there is no polish or love put into any part of Operation Troy and it ends up looking and feeling like a budget game.

The marriage of Battlefield and Gundam should have just worked. It should have been a hugely enjoyable online experience but due to the nature of the genre and the expectations for this type of game it was always going to be a struggle for Dimps and Dream Execution Technology to pull it off. Given more time, it could have been a solid game that would have been an interesting alternative to all the real-world war games that seem to centre on capturing flags in ruined cities. As it stands, however, the game looks and feels like it just hit alpha.