New Heavy Gear In Development

Right then, so you know about Hawken and the three MechWarrior games currently being manufactured (Online, Tactics and Tactical Command), the space-themed Strike Suit Zero, Reign of Thunder (from the makers of MechAssault), trusty old Perpetuum, indie curio M.A.V. and a new Transformers game (which aren’t strictly mechs, but may as well be), but did you also know that there was another bloody mech game on the way? A new Heavy Gear no less?

Previously unknown developer Stompy Bot Productions have just announced that it’s acquired the license to develop a new line of Heavy Gear games for PC, console and mobile platforms. We don’t known much else beyond honest intentions, except to say that company president James Taylor is “very excited to bring Heavy Gear back to the current generation of gaming fans.”

Heavy Gear was the IP that Activision got behind when they lost the MechWarrior license to Microsoft in the mid 1990s. Over the course of two games, the last of them in 1999, the future mega-publisher did a fairly decent job of stamping a big messy footprint into the mech-market pie, although by the turn of the millennium it’s fair to say that mechs had long since lost out in the popularity stakes to regular shooty first-person shooters. Aside from a couple of Xbox MechAssault games and the relatively recent Steel Battalion series, mecha games have largely been ignored ever since.

However, given the sheer number of mech games currently in production – many of them just a few months from completion – if anyone was under any doubt that mechs are in line to be the new zombies, they shouldn’t be any longer.