Wild Metal review (Dreamcast)

While the tank models themselves appear pretty sharp, the rest of the graphics look horrible. The terrain is a smattering of yellows and browns, making you wonder exactly what sort of planet you're actually on. With the exception of the occasional purple pipes or gray mesas, each level looks pretty much the same as the one before it - incredibly bland. Since the levels carry the same overall appearance, they start to blur together, and after a while it seems as if you've been driving through the same few mountains for the last couple of hours. In fact, the only thing that seems to separate the levels is the occasional night mission, which gives the graphics a slightly different spin, but on closer inspection you'll notice that the textures are still the same. The sound is extremely average, aside from a nice crunching sound every time you run over the scraps of recently destroyed enemies. What really kills the whole audio experience is the absolute lack of any background music. Iinstead of suspenseful music edging you on, you get to listen to the drone of the helicopter's rotors while you play.

The game does feature a multiplayer mode but doesn't take advantage of all four of the Dreamcast's controller ports. Still, you and a friend can have at each other in one of four different multiplayer arenas. If you want to make things more interesting, you can even change the session from straight fragging to scrambling to collecting all the power cores. Still, the multiplayer mode suffers from the same problems that plague the single-player mode, and it keeps Wild Metal from being any sort of game you'd want to invite friends over to play.

If it weren't for the terrible control scheme, horribly accurate AI, and confusing terrain, this game would still be overly simple. There are no difficult tasks set ahead of you - simply collect the cores and return to the starting point. It's unfortunate that the only difficulty found in the game is a direct result of the game's numerous flaws. With the Dreamcast's muscle, this game had plenty of potential, but it turned out to be a boring shooter so frustrating that it's hardly worth a rental.