In most video games, it is your job to fight evil space robots and stop them from taking over the world. There is nothing wrong with this premise. Indeed, it has given us some of the brightest games of the past decade. But once in a while it is nice to have a change of pace. Enter MechAssault 2, a game in which you fight evil space robots, but in which you are also an evil space robot yourself.

"Robot" is a bit of a misnomer here, but the correct term, "mech," requires a bit of explanation. Mechs are great big huge stompy space robots, meant for use in futuristic space warfare. They have cockpits and drivers. They have great big powerful space guns. Sometimes they also have space rayguns and space missiles and electrified space armour. Basically mechs are tanks with legs instead of tracks. They are good for climbing up hills and up the sides of collapsed buildings. They can go places no Humvee would dare attempt.

Mechs are big in science fiction. They figured prominently in the opening scenes of The Empire Strikes Back. They were the only good things in The Matrix Revolutions. According to the latest unscientific estimates, approximately 40% of all Japanese anime now involves brightly coloured mechs trashing futuristic cities. In sci-fi, mechs are nearly as popular as chesty babes dressed in form fitting plastic. So chances are good that MechAssault 2 will be an even bigger hit than the original Mechassault, which was enormous in its own right. (It also features chesty babes in form fitting plastic, see.)

The plotting is classic video game. It is the 30th century, in a time when planets all over the galaxy have been colonized and equipped with all the latest in paved roads and big box stores. An evil space organization called the Word of Blake is out to take over the galaxy. Its evil mechs are raining death and raygun fire down on civilization. Time is running out. It is your job, as a member of an elite team of mech engineers and pilots, to stop them.

You get to be the pilot, a nameless and bland tough guy who neither talks nor emotes. Officially you are the "Mech Warrior." Apparently you are suffering from a stress-related disorder and are not sleeping well. This has exactly zero bearing on the way the story plays out, but it is nice to know you are not completely stoic in the face of all these explosions.

There are many, many explosions. At the controls of a really big stompy mech, you can march through a city without needing to stop for anything. You can knock entire buildings down. You can crush people and gun turrets like bugs. You have more guns than Texas. It is a delightful and powerful feeling, wielding this much weaponry from atop this much steel. There is nothing plinky or traditionally video-gamey about it; when you take charge of a huge mech, you feel brave and unstoppable. The sense of weight and strength (and invincibility, even) is palpable.

Part of this is the play design itself. Because you are the Mech Warrior, you are good at driving all sorts of mechs. You are also good at hacking. The practical upshot of this is that many times, in the midst of a heated battle, you will be able to knock a bigger, more powerful mech to its knees, and then you will be able to pull its pilot out by the scruff of his neck, and then you will take the wheel and drive the thing as if it never belonged to anybody else. Trademark lawyers notwithstanding, the game should have been called Grand Theft Big Stompy Robot.

In the in-between periods, when you are just your scrawny little self wandering on the ground and the machines are thundering overhead, you will briefly marvel at the scale of the thing. Then you will remember that you are stoic and tough, and you will get back to the shooting.

The original MechAssault was the first online Xbox game to really take off. Pitting your mech against mechs from Oklahoma (and hearing their pilots' voices in your earpiece) was strange and new and utterly irresistable. With the new game, the experience returns, but the novelty is gone. It will be fun for a few weeks, and then the super-players will come to dominate the servers, and after that newcomers will be roasted into space grease within moments of their arrival.

The lesson? Get in now, before it is too late. Either that or practice.