After a decade of bouncing off of it, I finally beat Mech Platoon (GBA)
Mech Platoon is one of those games where the texture is so rough, so crunchy, so hard to enjoy, yet the fact that it exists at all is merit enough. Similar perhaps to how impressive the Starcraft port on N64 is, the fact that we have a fully fledged RTS experience on the GBA is a work of wizardry.
Several times over the past decade I've tried to pick up Mech Platoon, to see what it had to offer. Each time I bounced off just a few campaign missions in. Usually due to my own incompetence, struggling to juggle the mission requirements and the awkward control scheme. This final successful playthrough was fueled by my more recent endeavors in playing more RTS games as a whole, between the Age of series, Dawn of War series, and Total War: Warhammer, I felt more equipped with a better mindset to tackle Mech Platoon.
I am still baffled by the variation of units the game has which is about 36 unique units. That's a decent amount of variation on different stat spreads & damage types to experiment with.
Some interesting gameplay quirks I discovered during my playthrough. All ranged attacks are handled similarly to maybe how Age of Empires II handled arrows and siege shots. Where they actually have travel time and either land or missed based on a map-tile system, checking if a unit is on that tile when it lands. Meaning your units with fast movement speed can actually actively dodge ranged attacks if your micro is decent enough. The way they made melee work under the GBA limitations is interesting, a unit that is hit by melee will have their movement action cancelled. So if you're trying to retreat a slower unit and they are hit by a melee attack, they essentially get stun-locked and issuing new movement commands will only lead to them being hit again and stuck. It was neat seeing them intentionally have melee be able to "tie-up" ranged units like in other RTS.
Unit pathing is abysmal and maybe my only true gripe with the game? I had to micro individual movement so much because of how easy it is for workers & units to get stuck on every possible thing in their path.
EDIT: Oh my god, I found in the system menu there is a setting to set unit commands from "Renew" to "Continue". Renew meaning every time you issue commands to a unit/group it automatically deselects them after. Continue keeps the unit/group selected letting you issue multiple commands for micro. I played the entire game not knowing about this feature lmaoooo
The campaign was fun for what it was, the mission variation was nice even though they felt sort of restrictive and never let you do normal RTS game things like focusing on tech upgrades. You usually just macro out units if possible and can handle whatever the objective is. Having to salvage parts from fights during missions added some extra unneeded stress to unlock more units.
After getting 100% on my unit database for use in Skirmish/Multiplayer I had to go try out a Skirmish against the CPU. Finally a normal paced match where I can explore unit upgrades a bit more and try out some composition strategies. The way they leverage the CPU similar to how some RTS games give the CPU a resource or production advantage, Mech Platoon handles this by giving the CPU a natural start next to resources while your workers are forced to start somewhat away from your natural resource points. A weird way to handle it but sure. On my first attempt, the CPU actually two-factory rushed me with fast units and it got a good chuckle out of me. On my second attempt I went into unit production much quicker and beat the rush out, leaving their workers vulnerable to attack, which also caused the CPU to break and essentially give-up. I might use the mode to test some unit things out but as you'd expect the CPU is fairly manipulatable in this mode. One neat thing with skirmish is that even on the same maps, the resource points are randomized each time to keep things different which I thought was a nice touch.
It is tantalizing thinking about what deranged strategies could come from two humans trying to play this game against each other. I'd really like to explore the multiplayer and see what is possible, what units are good, what strategies emerge, but alas finding people willing to engage with this game earnestly, let alone for multiplayer is a large ask.
It might be a fun future personal project to try and recreate Mech Platoon in Godot and give it some much needed love like redrawn sprites and better unit pathing.