Dropzone

Review

This is the 22nd century and the combat arenas are brutal and explosive. These battles are fought with hi-tech rigs (Mechs). Can you find the right combination of rigs to take down your opponents and the Kavash (Aliens) in these arenas? But more importantly, do you dare to fight in the Dropzone?

Dropzone is an Action / Strategy/ MOBA game where you control three rigs in a battle, choosing to play against an online opponent, an AI opponent, or 2 versus 2. The aim is to upload more cores in the uplink than your opponent in order to win. There is a third mode where you have to eliminate waves of aliens and defend a reactor, which is located in the middle of the arena.  

Before you begin, make sure to play all three available tutorials; they will give you a very good understanding of how to fight, and also how to develop and build more efficient rigs. There are four types of rigs to choose from: Gunners (offensive units that inflict heavy damage), Tanks (your frontline units as they have better armour and very good weapons), Mechanics (great units to have with you as they can repair other rigs and also fight), Summoners (the weakest units but they have unusual abilities, one of which is to turn an enemy unit against its own team for a short time). Now it’s time to choose your three units; if you’re not quite sure how they will work together in the arena, you can test them in the practice arena against the Alien. 

A match goes for fifteen minutes and so far I have played in a couple of different arenas. The map features one uplink (which is in the middle of the arena), four vision points, several Alien hives and two Alien bosses. The hive will have a large number of Aliens to eliminate. Each hive will regenerate itself three times. The first time you destroy a hive, one core will appear next to it; the second time two cores and the third time three cores. Pick them up and go to the uplink to score a point. You will need to capture the vision points to see the map from that corner (lift the fog of war) and if you manage to capture all of them, you will get an additional point, which is very handy especially if you are locked on the same number of points (cores uploaded). If you fancy a fight with one or two of these big Alien bosses and win, an electrical icon will appear which will give you extra damage points for a short time when you pick it up. To return to the uplink, you can carry only one core per rig.  It will take about twenty seconds to upload the core and the unit will not be able to defend itself during this process. Make sure that you have two other Mechs close by to protect the unit.  When one of your units is destroyed, it will take thirty seconds to respawn on your starting point.

Each rig has specific gears which you can change before starting a game. The gears have numbers on them, which means that your unit needs to reach a certain level of experience during the battle to be able to use it. You might have a weapon with the number three on it, which means that your unit needs to level up three times to use it. How do you do that, you might ask? Very simple - each time you kill an Alien you receive an experience point, which will go towards a gauge; when the gauge is full you can level up one of your three units. The funny part is that the next gauge will need more experience points in order to be filled, and so on and so forth. Imperatibe to choose the right gears before battling.

If you are victorious at the end of the round, you will receive Jovians (game currency), crates and even blueprints if one of your rigs levels up. You can buy additional crates with your jovians and when you open them, you’ll receive additional gears.

Dropzone has good graphics and runs very well for an early access game. The controls are very responsive but it will take you a while to get use to them.