izigame.me

Seriously, there is no fighting. It's a pastoral game. It's got some farming. Like, you know, seedlings and all that.
You'd think a body wouldn't have to make that clear but every third post in Steam's forum right now is "r i can fite alun?" or something. There's a run of people who've forgotten to read reviews, or watch the game's preview movies, or... am I even writing this for anybody other than myself? Am I leaving myself a time capsule if I come back as a flesh-eating cyborg in the year 3027 and forgot what this game is?
Okay, dear self: no, u r not can fite alun.

If that's driven off my future, flesh-hating self, I think we may be safe. So listen. This is a game about farming.
Well, like I said, it's a pastoral game. So there's farming, there's meandering through forests or the seashore. Sometimes evil seed capsules fall from the sky onto your farm plots, but your mech vacuum cleaner can shloop them right out of the air. Or there's nefarious blobbies that slow you down, but you also carry a mech-sized super-soaker. At worst, your farm might be set back a bit, but this is nothing a little collection can't fix. And if you've stripped a lot of the local resources, feeding the local animals will hasten the rate the resources respawn.
You can super-soak your coop partners. It gives you a cheevo. But this is as "violent" as the game gets. Your pulse will never be at risk at accelerating at any point. Accept that it's a farming game, and that only the most macho of men can play this, and you'll be fine. You'll be as cool as me, and I'm so macho I punched an M1A2 Abrams to pieces. Took me three punches. Real life, I mean. Honest.
The game's visuals are lovely. The grass is, like, hyper-saturated green. The sky is super-blue. The wildlife is a little cute sometimes, and a lot weird sometimes, but they're aliens, it's cool. And your mech looks like vintage farm equipment. It's a bright, cheerful game that's a nice antidote to all the terrible things going on in the news right now.
If mech details matter to you, it's roughly Heavy Gear sized, and it's much easier to control than, say, something from Mechwarrior. You move much like a first person shooter, though with a bit of a delay as the legs rotate to the right direction. Mouse look makes the legs auto-match where you're going, again, with a bit of a delay. It will be natural for most of you, and a little weird for me. I like to drive with a manual transmission, all this automatic stuff disorients me.
There's just a couple wrinkles in the game, honestly.

1: There's no keybinding. At all. I suspect it was probably meant to be console first, PC second, but... seriously. No keybinding. The controls are reasonably fine if you're a right-handed keyboardist (other than the weirdness of sprint being on "shift"). It'll take a controller, which is why my wife is still playing instead of having refunded it.

No sir, keybinds got added today. I tried them out, I have bound keys. Marvellous. Left-handed and AZERTY-keyboard-using players rejoice.
2: The mech is basically a cylinder. It will fall over if you don't land on flat enough terrain, or stub your shins or something. And then falling, will tumble for awhile as the arms basically cease to exist. It'll eventually stop rolling and you can flip it over, but it is a trifle annoying.
3: The map isn't that big. I mean, it's big enough all four players could make their own farms in the starter area with ample room to spare, but it might take, say, ten minutes to walk across it. It's a couple kilometers across, perhaps. Maybe playing it with four people is a bit much. But it is nice with the missus here.

4: There's a commentator, "PIP-3R", who's supposedly some kind of orbital robot thing but does little comments on your actions. Getting into a mech, getting out of a mech, placing a building, etc. I don't mind, but... it's a little much. That could stand to be dialled down a fair bit. Maybe there's a setting I missed somewhere.

PIP-3R communication rates have been dialled down, and she can be silenced altogether if that's your jam. I just didn't need the unintentionally-sarcastic, "Remember where you parked it?" every time I took a tumble in my mech and had to jump out to flip it. (Though it was funny the first dozen times.)
But that's all I got. It hits the mark, I'm going to be a mech pilot tillin' the fields and plantin' the crops 'til the mech cows come home. Pardner. We're streaming our playthroughs as we go, and I intentionally buried the link way down here. If you stuck with me, maybe you'd like to pop by and say hello. That'd be pretty cool. I'm at http://twitch.tv/fdejeuner, and I keep a pretty consistent schedule.
In the end, this is a nice, relaxing time. Aside from the thought of future cyborgs attacking me through my reviews.