Metal Drift is developed and published by Black Jacket Studios.

Metal Drift is intended as a multiplayer tank combat game, although you can create (and join) a server populated with bots. The server browser provides easy access to online matches, though the player counts seem to be off. There are only five arenas to play in, but they are designed well with multiple paths to the goal. The default game length of eight minutes is just right for the game’s pace: not too long, but not too short. There is only one game mode to enjoy: capture the ball, where you must carry the ball to the goal in the enemy base. Metal Drift features all of the online score keeping trappings, like leaderboards, achivements, and persistent player data. Statistics are used to unlock additional weapons and features, a feature I dislike to the extreme. It’s fine to have upgrades that unlock over time, but only through a single game: new players should never be artificially handicapped.

As it stands, new players will have a “selection” of one weapon and one ability: a strategic disadvantage right from the beginning. I prefer having all of the content available to all players, which is what Section 8 does. You have to finish a match in order to earn experience points, a questionable limitation if you have to leave in the middle of a game. You do level up quickly, especially if you capture the ball, but you do not get to choose which weapons to unlock as they are presented in a linear fashion. Boo! What if I want the super powerful weapon the really experienced guy has been killing me with? The weapons also increase in effectiveness the more you use them, which is cool. Preventing new users from all the game offers, however, is not cool.

Once you have logged enough hours in Metal Drift, you’ll have access to some pretty neat weapons and abilities, which makes restricting the content even more disappointing. While most of the weapons are pretty conventional in first person shooters terms (pulse cannon = assault rifle, ion cannon = sniper rifle, plasma launcher = grenade launcher), there are some highlights: the temporal cannon can travel through walls (making it a great pairing with the sensor upgrade that allows you to see all tanks), the artemis cannon travels through shields (like a shotgun), and the shock cannon is a short-range bomb. The upgrades offer more tactical variety: in addition to simple stat increases (armor, power, speed), you can automatically repair of your tank over time, see the positions of every tank, invisibility, or look like an enemy tank. The most popular is hyperspace, which spawns you near the ball. See why I’d like to have access to all of these neat features from the very beginning?

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