Mecha Ritz: Steel Rondo review

Mecha Ritz’s bullet hell holiday offers a wide assortment of different ships as well as difficulty that adjusts to your performance. But occasionally, it feels like flying coach.

Mecha Ritz: Steel Rondo makes an uninspired first impression. Cutscenes deliver amateurish illustrations that look like placeholder art. The text which accompanies these drawings is vague, named Veloce who invents mecha. Inadvertently, her invention annihilates the planet’s people. The last hope for salvation is rooted in an anomalous mechanized machine endowed with human will. But before redemption can happen the lone mech must endure fifteen vertically-scrolled stages overflowing with projectiles. That’s where Steel Rondo starts to get interesting.

Admittedly, the visuals won’t initially win you over. Although the game can be played in tate mode, the game defaults to a display that is less than one-third the size of the Switch’s screen. Worse, enemies are rendered with a single-color, simulated wireframe style that resembles an antiquated ZX Spectrum game. But soon the playfield will be awash with neon hues, concealing some of the game’s blemishes.

Initially, you’ll be able to pilot two different orb-shaped mechs. But that number gradually increases with subsequent playthroughs, maxing out at seven different ships that each offer an alternate version, for an inventory of fourteen different playable vessels.

Pleasingly, each craft has a distinct loadout built around a consistent control scheme. Tapping the fire button emits your Normal Shot, typically dispensing a wide field of fire. Holding the button down activates your ship’s Special Weapon. This pattern usually isn’t as wide but provides a more penetrating method of attack.

Occasionally, the game adds additional ship capabilities. One early unlock summons a barrage of homing missiles every time you switch firing modes, effectively granting a third weapon. Another mecha encourages players to graze enemy bullets, filling up a powerful wave burst weapon in the process. With each craft boosting distinctive weaponry, speeds, and additional capabilities, the game’s fleet of mecha can feel like a fighting game roster.

Curiously, bombs function like your main guns. A button hold can trigger the type of blast that can ravage a boss’ health bar. But a short tap will produce a smaller effect, which is useful when you need to perform a bit of projectile canceling. While Ritz doesn’t offer the ability to continue a game after defeat, the game does provide an ample number of extra ships and shields which are obtained by shooting power-ups.

Like a simplified Ikaruga, Mecha Ritz’s stages will coax you into regularly switching weapons to best deal with different types of threats. Mastery involves prioritizing your targets, obliterating those opponents capable of producing copious bullet streams. But don’t expect to save humanity by merely memorizing the game’s stages. Like Compile’s 1986 STG, Zanac, Mecha Ritz adjusts difficulty based on your performance.

Although the game provides a 42-page in-game manual that explains many of the fundamentals, Mecha Ritz is a bit cagey on how variables like Heat and Rank function. Essentially, the former represents your attack power and fills between one to five on-screen bars. The latter is a numerical measure of attack intensity, affecting things like the scrolling speed of the game to how far enemy projectiles travel before they fizzle out. As such, expect to face powered-up foes that might emit an explosion of munitions when they are destroyed if you’re doing well.

The manual is forthright about its bonuses, detailing different methods to earn scoring dividends. But it leaves some mystery when it comes to Ritz’s branching levels. Earning a high rank and moving through a stage as quickly as possible can push you toward an alternate level where you’ll face different bosses. But you probably won’t know how to replicate the conditions needed to get into these alternative stages.

Undoubtedly, a run through Mecha Ritz: Steel Rondo is a sufficiently hectic experience. Stages soon produce massive surges of intersecting bullets, forcing you to position your ship’s hitbox with pinpoint accuracy. Woefully, boss battles aren’t always remarkable. While some superiors will bully you into moving toward the top of the screen, most merely assail you with different projectile formations.

Beyond the standard campaign, offline leaderboards, the substantial in-game guide, and a collection of the game’s expositional bits, Ritz also offers a training mode.  As with the main mode, there are some remarkable customization options, with players able to adjust the colors of bullets and blasts, as well as set their starting rank. But training also offers the ability to cycle through the game’s collection of craft, which would have made for a stimulating variant mode.

Mecha Ritz: Steel Rondo was played on Switch
with review code provided by the publisher.