Mobile Suit Gundam: Gundam vs. Zeta Gundam review (PlayStation 2)

For an in-depth single-player experience, universal century mode is the place to go. In this mode you can choose to play through Gundam history as the Anti-Earth Union Group, the Titans, or the Axis. You'll start off on a timeline that is populated by various colored dots that represent events or missions. You can follow several different pilots through history, often participating in the same event multiple times with different pilots. Your performance in battle can alter the outcome of history, and if you don't like the result you can go back and redo missions that you've already completed. There are literally hundreds of missions to complete, although many of them are exactly the same but with different pilots. As you play, you'll earn battle points that you can then use to level up your mobile suit. Higher-level suits have more strength, defense, stamina, and ammo than the suits you start out with.

Regardless of which mode you choose to play, you can earn gallery points, which you can then use to purchase hundreds of unlockable bonuses, including mobile suits, illustrations, characters, and movies. However, unlocking mobile suits only allows you to view them in a gallery, and unfortunately the suits aren't very detailed or interesting to look at.

In fact, the entire game suffers from underwhelming visuals. Gundam vs. Zeta Gundam looks exactly the same as Mobile Suit Gundam: Federation vs. Zeon, which came out almost three years ago. You'll even see some of the exact same stages in both games. Environments are dull and empty, and all of the textures have a washed-out look. There are a few destructible objects in some of the stages, but they just aren't satisfying to destroy. For example, in one of the city stages you can destroy buildings, but rather than collapsing in a heap of rubble as you'd expect, the buildings simply fade into the ground. The mobile suits themselves animate pretty well, and the portraits look nice, but the actual models look blurry and flat.

The sound in the game consists of a few repeating slashing and laser noises. The sound effects aren't quite as powerful as what you'd expect from these hulking mechanical giants, but they work here. The soundtrack is dramatic and fits with the action, but there aren't any tracks that really stand out. There are some short voice-overs from the pilots, which are appropriately campy and match the source material well. However, the vocal interactions that occur during battle get lost in everything else that's going on, making it difficult to catch all the dialogue.

When you get down to it, Gundam vs. Zeta Gundam is simple, frenetic button mashing delivered in two-minute bursts. There's some skill involved in evading enemies and rationing your ammo, but this is really just a basic arcade action game at its core. The multiplayer modes are great, but the unsteady frame rate quickly kills the fun. Gundam fans will enjoy unlocking all the mobile suits and playing through the universal century timeline from multiple perspectives, but everyone else will probably be left wondering what all the fuss is about.