In Japan, mech games sell faster than an Essex slapper's story of bedding a Premiership footballer. Make that mech games based on a best-selling anime series and you can insert Beckham in between the hypothetically-speaking sheets. Rather than being born and bred on home soil, though, Robotech: Battlecry is actually an American take on the series, and with so many Eastern fans, we may be talking Pearl Harbour revisited if the Yanks cock this up!

The action is set near the end of the Macross Saga (the most popular of Robotech's three celluloid chapters) and focuses on Jack Archer - a rookie Robotech Defence Force fighter pilot. He's in control of a reconfigurable craft that can alter form, Transformer-like, into three separate vehicles (Fighter, Guardian and Battleoid). What follows are over fifteen missions set on a post-apocalyptic Earth in which players fend off a full-on alien invasion by judging which form best suits the terrain and wading in with some hellfire hospitality and evasive manoeuvres.

We'd like to say that this will appeal to everyone who likes a good extra-terrestrial dogfight. In truth, only die-hard fans will take to it. The action is delivered by vibrant, cel-shaded graphics (despite the anime series featuring nothing of the sort) which are pretty, but lack detail. Sloppy physics and unresponsive controls mean that mecha fans will want to look elsewhere while casual players ought not to bother at all.

Unless you're a fan of the anime series, any enjoyment derived from this is very short-lived.

We graduated from Battle Of The Planets on to harder anime.

The gameplay is more clunky than the subject matter.