The original Mech Assault was the first game I played on Xbox Live and it was a great game. For the past few months I had been looking forward to the release of Mech Assault 2: Lone Wolf for a fresh Xbox Live experience. After playing a few games online, I’m very disappointed.

The single player campaign in Mech Assault 2 is challenging and fun, just like the first game. They’ve upped the intensity and added some new features that make it one of the top games released in 2004. The controls have changed, but are still extremely easy to use. There are new mechs, new maps, and new enemies to blow up. The maps/worlds are really well done with some great detail and design. With the addition of new mechs come the addition of a few new types of weapons that add more variety to the game.

The online play is a whole different story. I still say that Mech Assault on Xbox Live is one of the greatest games for the platform. MA2 falls short though. They’ve gotten rid of the things that made the first game so great. I only played a few games, so I may have missed something, but you can no longer pick your mech before the game begins. Basically you spawn with your team and it’s a race to see who can get to the good mechs first, so you can no longer pick your favorite mech for battle. How am I supposed to get good with a mech if I can’t choose it all the time?

Getting into a game is a whole different story too. Why can’t the video game developers use the same match making system used in Halo 2? Probably because it works so well and they wouldn’t have anything to work on then. Since I was really looking for something special with MA2 and the online plays falls well short, I have to give it a B-.