Trenched is not as novel as I have come to expect from DF

I just played the Trenched demo.

The mechs, or "trenches," are upgradable and customizable. In the first mission I unlocked a sniper rifle to use in the next. The basic weapons are two machine gun turrets, one one either side of the trench. They are mapped to the right and left trigger, respectively. It seems that a hard limit on ammo is not a consideration, but reloading is. Reloading takes time depending on the type of gun--it seems the sniper rifle takes longer to reload than the the machine guns, for example. Pressing down on the right stick zooms in slightly.

Enemies drop "scrap" which you can either walk over or hold down RB to activate a magnet that pulls the scrap in towards you. The scrap is then used to deploy, and upgrade, turrets. In the demo mission, you can use two different turret types: a shotgun one and a "damper" turret that slows down enemy movement. There are suggested turret emplacement points that are useful to use, but turrets can be set down anywhere.

The trenches move slow, but I am not sure if you can upgrade speed later on. It is useful to stay near the point you are protecting, though, because enemies will spawn from multiple locations so it is best to be able to cover as many angles as possible. I can already tell it would be quite easy to get overwhelmed, so this game is definitely designed for co-op.

The game has a mixture of a steampunk (the good guys) and a pulp sci-fi (the bad guys) aesthetic that is quite odd together. The dialogue is over the top and cheesy, in a sort of classic early 20th century way, but some of it is also humorous.

The demo showed several enemy types: resistors, which are the basic cannon fodder enemies that run it to get close, Tommies (now that's a turn-of-the-century British term for ya!) which are the basic ranged enemies. These generally seem set on attacking the point you are defending. Another enemy type (cannot recall the name) are easily identifiable by being a glowing red, and they target you specifically, kamikaze style. Destroying them close to each other will cause them to blow up other enemies. There was one boss that seemed intent on attacking your base rather than you, and it had a lot of HP. Other than that, it was not behaving much differently from the other enemies.

While it seems like a solid game, I'm not sure I can justify spending $15 on it. It has all the basics there, but it seems to lack a certain Double Fine charm that I cannot really quantify.