Steel Hunters takes the the spark-filled clashes between Megatron and Optimus Prime and slows them down to create a methodic, tactical experience with familiar hero shooter and extraction elements. The mech battler from World of Tanks developer Wargaming releases in early access on Steam this week, on April 2.

I played a demo of Steel Hunters at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco a couple weeks ago, where I was shown seven mechs with fascinating designs—ranging from your standard humanoid Gundam-like models to mechs based off of dogs and bears—as well as slow, tactical gameplay that felt gripping while facing off against mechs, but mundane in the moments in between.

One of Steel Hunters' primary modes sees six teams of two drop into a large map filled with a variety of drones, supply drops, and other points of interest to explore. Each team spawns at one of eight predetermined spawn points across the map, far enough from each other to discourage early game combat between player-controlled mechs.

Steel Hunters' combat follows a MOBA-like match progression system where players kill drones and bots in order to collect energy and save up enough for special abilities and ultimates that are later used in battle. As a result, the opening moments of the few matches I played were slow and unvaried.

I kicked drones with my Ursus bear mech, shot others down with whatever gun I had equipped, and then walked to pick up the energy they dropped. Gear loadouts were decided before dropping into matches, so there was no specialized looting found in battle royales to add excitement and variety to the first portion of a match.

While those early moments moved like molasses, the actual fights against other players—bots during the demo, but still—were far more exciting. Individual abilities for mechs went on display immediately as coordination with my AI-controlled teammate was essential. My Weaver spider mech had a Reinhardt-like shield that provided cover for my teammate and I as we emptied clips into the enemy.

Slow, tactical coordination was almost forced. Maneuverability—especially for the four legged mechs—while smooth, was extremely limited. Jumping and dashing were restricted to two uses at a time, two small energy bars needed to recharge before they could be used again. I understand the interest in wanting to move meticulously and in synergy with your partner, but I don't think that means that you have to do so as slowly as Steel Hunters wanted me to.

Fights were lengthy, even though I didn't feel completely comfortable controlling the mechanical beasts in front of me after so little time with the game. It helped that combat situations shared a large amount of DNA with similar situations found in hero shooters or battle royales. Fighting over an extraction point often led to a flurry of explosion effects, debris from the destructible small houses and cars, and shield graphics that popped up.

Despite being limited to teams of two, this is a tactical game. Every second of a match should ideally be planned out, from early rotation direction choices to which bots you engage to what sort of terrain you meet enemy players on. All the choices I made mattered, but the actions I took while making those choices didn't feel all that exciting. Lighting up two enemy players teased out more enthusiasm from me, but were barely worth the time I spent lollygagging around the map looking for droids to bop and boxes to open.

It's hard not to compare Steel Hunters to Mecha Break, another mech-based shooter with an extraction mode and other similar ideas releasing this spring. Mecha Break is all about recreating action scenes from Gundam and Pacific Rim while moving at breakneck speed. Steel Hunters couldn't have felt more different in that regard.

There is no twitch-based gameplay or fast maneuverability in Wargaming's mech battler. There is a jump and dash, but they are subdued compared to arcadier mech action games and the stamina system limits them greatly. Every ability—even my bear's melee attack—had a cooldown that made me panic in some fights when it wouldn't let me simply melee my opponent multiple times in succession when they were feet away from me.

Steel Hunters did inspire more of a feeling of 'real' mech combat for me, though. Slowly clashing against other teams while buildings crumble and cars flip on the ground around us created a sense of scale that Mecha Break didn't, but if I had to choose, I'd pick Mecha Break's Gundam-style action over Steel Hunters' more subdued battles, which lean further in the direction of MechWarrior.

Overall, Steel Hunters has fascinating mech choices and combat designed with balance and tactical gameplay in mind. But it's slow. Even when running around on all fours with the bear, I felt sluggish and I had to plan each paw swing carefully.

Wargaming is keeping things simple for now: There are only seven mechs and game modes are limited to six teams of two—and there will be no trios and squads for the beta launch. The developers will ramp things up over time, adding more complexity with new mechs and modes over time.

While Mecha Break offers my preferred flavor of mech warfare, Steel Hunters had a promising closed beta in December—it attracted over 200,000 players and the studio gathered over 700 pages of feedback. Wargaming was so confident in the game that it moved the early access release up—it's out on April 2 on Steam.

Balatro developer LocalThunk is notoriously private. It's not some kind of put-on: Wout van Halderen, communications director of Balatro publisher Playstack, told us at GDC that LocalThunk isn't "trying to pull a Banksy," he's just "a person who doesn't really like the spotlight," and choosing to stay anonymous helps him manage the pressures of his newfound success.

But like a king wandering incognito amongst his subjects, that anonymity also enables LocalThunk to get away with things that other, more recognizable developers never could. As an example, LocalThunk was actually at GDC, and took the opportunity to school the crowd with some slick Balatro moves, before fading away into the crowd like a half-heard whisper.

"One of my fav moments from GDC—they had a booth set up to play Balatro since it was an award nominee," LocalThunk revealed on Bluesky. "I watched for a bit then I gave it a go myself. Crushed a white stake run. Someone approached me as I was about to leave. 'Wow you must have played this before!' 'I guess you could say that'

"Also this was actually the first and only time I have seen strangers play my game in real life. Have yet to see Balatro in the wild. So as far as I'm concerned y'all are just Truman Show-ing me."

LocalThunk's tale of ghosting through GDC inspired some fun responses:

A few people said LocalThunk's extremely public yet virtually invisible spin with Balatro at GDC reminded them not so much of Banksy, but another famous celebrity who goes places and does stuff almost entirely unnoticed by the world at large:

One person recounted some advice they were given ahead of GDC: "[Don't] read the badges until AFTER you have talked to someone for at least a couple of minutes, so you don’t get star struck." LocalThunk's tale, they added, gave them another reason to stick to that policy.

In this case, though, I don't think reading the badge would've helped. Most people don't know LocalThunk's real name or what he looks like, and even if he'd been walking around with one of those "Hi! I'm LocalThunk" stickers on his shirt we probably wouldn't believe it anyway, unless he wore it while accepting top honors at the GDC Awards. In that case, well, maybe. But I hope he doesn't: Anonymity seems good for him, and it turns out it's kind of entertaining for all of us, too.

Bear with me, dear reader, and ask yourself: What makes for a good collectible? I obviously have a few good ideas now, because I'm writing this article, but before then I admit I'd be hard-pressed to give you a proper list. I know what makes a bad one, mind, but what gives them the juice? Is it something that makes a little noise when you pick it up? Does it make a bar increase somewhere?

Joe Morrissey, a seasoned writer and director who spoke at GDC this year, has a few solid ideas. In case you're unfamiliar, Morrissey has quite a few credits, including Diablo 2 and 3, InFamous 1 and 2, and Ghost of Tsushima.

His talk, "Making Collectibles Count", was an illuminating chat on what makes a pickup worth it. It's also a very funny, eight-point dunk on Breath of the Wild, which infamously made you grab 999 Korok Seeds for a bit of golden poo.

Morrissey breaks things down into three tiers—one that stamps out the fundamentals, one that elevates them, and a couple of cautionary tales.

The golden rule(s)

First up is "discoverability", which Morrissey says is "also the one that most developers, including myself, at times, have fallen short on. This trait is the player asking the question, 'how do I find this collectible?'"

There's a sort of tipping point he outlines whereupon finding your first gubbin, a player might ask "I wanna [find] more of those, how do I do that?" However, "if the answer is 'well, you just gotta search for them' … that's not gonna be a good time. Nobody is gonna have fun with that. They'll just go online and find wherever the stuff is."

It's here where Korok Seeds catch a stray, and not for the first time in the talk: "I'm lookin' at you, Korok Seeds."

The way you work around this, he argues, is to add ways for players to seek out the collectibles—systems where you can scan the environment work, but you can also use visual cues. Ghost of Tsushima utilised black smoke, fireflies, steam, and a little bird that'd try and get your attention to steer you towards a locale.

The second 'gold-tier' rule is obvious on the face of it: You gotta reward players for what they find, and that reward has to encourage more exploration—he shouts out the jump orbs from Crackdown here, astutely observing:

"The more of these orbs you collect, the higher you can jump, and the further you jump, the more you're allowed to get to those previously impossible orbs. So your reward for getting these hard-to-get orbs was the ability to get harder-to-get orbs."

This honestly tracks—this kind of reward system is something MMOs have used to keep players trucking along when it comes to gear upgrades, so the fact it's effective in collect-athons scans nicely, as well. It's a lesson some creative directors have ignored, Morrissey says.

"I've talked to a number of creative directors at different places I've been at where they're like, 'hey, we're not going to give you the rewards for the collectible'. No one really cares about this, it isn't a big deal.' And then, sure enough, we do very early play testing. And all the play testers are like, 'why would I waste my time doing this?'"

The last point of import is—as you might wager—making it fun to pick this stuff up. "You can create a fun mechanic that actually gives the players some sort of skill that they can improve on," he says. "It could be collecting the SKATE in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater." These things help to break up gameplay flow, making the whole process more active—think Riddler Trophies in the Arkham Games.

Fluff and stuff

The next tier helps elevate your garden variety collectible with flavor, via worldbuilding, fictional justification, and character attachment.

Worldbuilding's pretty self-explanatory—the things you collect are an opportunity to "reveal more about the world of the character." Basically, doohickeys with backstories—he uses the example of the backpacks in the Spider-Man games, which all come with a 3D model and a snippet of backstory to help you get "a sense of the man behind the mask".

Fictional justification just means making it make sense: "This trait asks us as designers to justify what all of these glowy, hard-to-get-to, often very noisy things actually are in the world." Despite his enduring love of Crackdown's orbs, he notes that they fail on this point—nobody's suspension of disbelief is maintained by the Jump Spheres. "Just take a beat and think about it, because it's not that hard."

Character attachment runs a little deeper, and has more to do with overarching narrative. He uses an example from Assassin's Creed: Odyssey—its Standing Stones being linked in the story to the protagonist's dead family. "Now it's on them to kind of go to these places that their son couldn't." Essentially, it's stuff that makes you think: "This is exactly what my character would do."

The final two points are more about courtesy, and have the lowest weighting in his eventual tier list. Morrissey thinks that collectibles should be in a "relatively consistent location," because "players will pick up on that, and it'll make sense to them." Meanwhile, they ought to be in a "reasonable quantity". Or, rather, "How many times are you going to make players do this"? Too many, at times. Too many.

He then uses these tiered elements to grade a bunch of different items in games, captured here by PCG's own Tim Clark. Unsurprisingly, Korok Seeds are C-tier.

Honestly, while it's funny to see Nintendo's 999-item long collectathon duly roasted, I'm more impressed with the depth of thought that goes into making something we take for granted. I'm sure we can all list collection quests we were annoyed by, but it's harder to outline ones we enjoyed and why—as Morrissey has done here.

Remember when there was kind of a mini-kerfuffle among Fallout fans because Bethesda wouldn't let you kill children in its games? Because it's okay to set off a nuclear device in the middle of a populated settlement but murking a lippy 14-year-old who's probably just going to grow up to be a wasteland raider is beyond the pale, I guess. Anyway, I bring this up now because Inzoi players made an unexpected and rather startling discovery almost immediately after the game went live: You could kill kids in the newly-launched life sim by pasting them with your car.

Evidence of the surprise feature was shared on YouTube by Velizxr—it's not graphic but, fair warning if you're sensitive to such things, you are about to see a child get launched into the next life courtesy of a sensible, mid-sized hatchback. (You should probably ignore the raucous laughter. It is pretty funny though.)

I am obligated to say that running over children definitely is not funny in the real world and you absolutely shouldn't do it, but videogames aren't the real world and Inzoi, especially in its early access state, is no exception: You can tell by the way the other nearby children in the video don't run screaming and crying in the wake of the wipeout, or even glance in the direction of their distant, departed pal, but instead just stand around with a sort of "aw jeez" demeanor, as though they'd been yelled at by the teacher for being too noisy instead of, y'know, getting tattooed by a Hyundai.

Inzoi's "Teen" rating from the ESRB says Zois "can die from natural or accidental causes," including "traffic accidents," but kids were meant to be excluded from such unfortunate outcomes: Krafton confirmed with IGN that going all road rage on the playground wasn't on the menu, and in fact it doesn't think any of this is funny at all.

"This issue was caused by an unintended bug that has been resolved in the latest patch," a Krafton rep said. "These depictions are highly inappropriate and do not reflect the intent and values of Inzoi. We understand the seriousness of this matter and age-appropriate content and we are strengthening our internal review processes to prevent similar incidents in the future."

I haven't been able to find any patch notes to that effect, but the dedicated professionals at Waypoint put it to the test and sure enough, when you run into a kid now you get a little "bonk" noise and nothing else: The intended statistic doesn't even look at you. It's a tremendously imperfect (and, I would guess, very rushed) solution, but in some ways even funnier than watching small children go from zero to 60 faster than a top fuel dragster. Adults, however, still fold up like yesterday's laundry, so at least we still have that.

(Listen, you can accuse me of being tasteless about this if you want, but never forget that EA intentionally added the ability to consign sims to a slow, watery death in The Sims 4, and we were all happy about it. So don't be acting like I'm the bad guy here.)

If you want to take your own shot at turning pre-teens into road waffles, the first thing you'll need is a car. If you don't have one, don't worry: We have a guide that will get you on the road in no time. Drive carefully.