The folks over at Double Fine Productions seem to be some sort of video game genre necromancers. In Trenched the studio has managed to revive not just one, but two genres that many have written off as dead: mech games and tower defense.
Mechs don’t get a lot of love these days. A couple games trickle out in the western market from Japan each year, and usually die a quiet death as they languish on store shelves ignored by both gamers and critics. Trenched recalls the glory days of the ’90s when the genre was popular and it seemed as if the torrent titles would never stop. It feels like a modern XBLA game out of an alternate universe; a universe where the Earthsiege series didn’t transform into an FPS (Tribes) and where FASA studios and MechWarrior still remain king. In short, Trenched makes mechs fun and relevant again. At the same time, the developers take the genre’s mechanics with that trademark Double Fine charm, and wrap it all around a tower defense core.
