Do you like blowing up s–t? Do you like making things that blow s–t up? Like getting together with your friends and blowing up s–t? Well, then buy Trenched. Easy.
The tale of Trenched starts with a pair of WW1 miltary men losing there legs and being confined to listening to a radio. One day a mysterious broadcast comes through and kills all who hear it, of course except these two men. Naturally. After surviving this broadcast they soon realize it has made them incredibly intelligent.
Both men set out to engineer a way to help them with their disability. One man, Frank Woodruff, creates the Trench, a mechanical walker whose purpose was that of helping wounded soldiers walk again.
The other man, Vladimir Farnsworth, goes the other direction. He engineers Tube cables and spreads them across the world. Enabling him to spread his second creation, the Monovision Army, in an attempt to conquer the world. Thus, Trenches come in and a war begins.
Explosions, explosions and more explosions. All of them beautiful. Highly colorful with exceptional sprites. Watch out for each explosion of a Monovision menace, pretty lights. The designs of a Trench fall somewhere between Mech Warrior and “aliens invade the earth” parody. Large mechanical walkers with enormous firepower, but still have rickety generators clinging to life on the sides of them. Don’t worry though it works very, very well.
The Monovision themselves are one part lizard, one part television, one part pure electricity. There’s quiet a variety to the Monovision in terms of how many different species there are. As well as, the unique design of each species. So you’ll be hard pressed to tire of blowing them up.
In battle, you use the left trigger to fire the weapons on the left side of your Trench and right trigger to fire the weapons on your right. With each Monovision’s destruction comes the scraps of their bodies flying through the air. You can pick up these scraps by running over them or by activating your Trench’s magnet. Which will pull all scraps in the vicinity towards you.
The scraps are used as currency to purchase defense turrets. Turrets range from support, like the magnetic turret which collects Monovision scraps for you, to the heavy turrets, like that of the heavy artillery turret which trys to blow up anything with-in range. Each turret can also be upgraded during battle increasing it’s damage as well as it’s area of effect. EAch upgrade is more expensive then the actual turret, but it’s more effective to upgrade existing turrets then to keep calling new ones onto the battlefield.
The types of turrets you can call down from the McKinley, the Trench armies massive battleship HQ, depends on the type of core (torso) you equip your Trench with. You can change everything from the legs of your Trench, to your core, weapons, turrets it can call, even it’s paint job. The combination possibilities are well over a thousand.
You obtain different equipement for your Trench through item drops from mini-bosses throughout the game, purchasing them in the shop on the McKinley, as well as earning them for completing levels and challenges.
The mulitplayer, let me tell you, is something special. Not that it hasn’t been done before, or that is does anything new, it’s just a blast to play. The single player and multiplayer function exactly the same. Same levels, same bosses. So why not just play through with some friends? You can join mulitplayer by going to the “Radio Room” on the McKinley and search for more Trench pilots. Once more pilots are found, everyone’s Trench comes on deck of the McKinley.
You can inspect their Trench or head over to Commander Woodruff and choose what level you want to play on. Any player can choose the level. Then once a player chooses “Ready to Deploy” in the Trench customization screen, a countdown timer appears. Time to launch and destroy some Monovision.
Trenched is an amazingly good time. With or without friends. The diversity in enemies, weapons, turrets and Trench customization gives you more than enough game for your money. Along with the number of tactical options you can employ, Trenched gives you a rediculous amount of replayability. A must buy for your XBLA collection.
[easyreview title=”Trenched (Iron Brigade) Overall Score 8.5” cat1title=”Graphics 8/10” cat1detail=”” cat1rating=”8″ cat2title=”Gameplay 9/10” cat2detail=”” cat2rating=”9″ cat3title=”Story 7/10” cat3detail=”” cat3rating=”7″ summary=”ignore“]
