STEEL BATTALION AND STEEL BATTALION: LINE OF CONTACT (XBOX)
- Audience-Alienating Premise: The game coming with a massive $200 mech controller with a very huge learning curve along with having an extremely high level of difficulty ultimately doomed the game to financial failure, at least at first.
- Cult Classic: The complexity, expense, and monolithic difficulty pretty much ensured the game(s) would never be a commercial hit by any metric, but for those lucky hardcore few who have played it in the intended way, it's one of the best damn Real Robot games out there, and certainly one of the most unique. Even in the decades after Xbox Live was discontinued, there remains a niche, yet surprisingly thriving and dedicated fandom that keeps online play running through homebrew scenes.
- Memetic Mutation: "Cheddar coming boys!", from a Line of Contact concept trailer
. Cheddar refers to artillery/howitzer fire. - Presumed Flop: With its notoriously complicated, elaborate, and expensive required setup, it's widely believed that the game was a total flop that only lives on through the goodwill of its critical acclaim and dedicated cult fanbase. However, according to director Atsushi Inaba, the game miraculously sold enough to break even, technically making it a success, albeit in a scenario that Inaba admitted was something he lucked out on and would not want to replicate.
STEEL BATTALION: HEAVY ARMOR (XBOX 360)
- Player Punch: Every time one of your crewmates die, their picture from the graduating class (that you are a part of) goes gray and a letter is sent to their next of kin informing them of their death.
- Scrappy Mechanic: The Kinect can sometimes be responsible for not allowing you to react to situations in time. And yes, it is the Kinect that dealt major blow to the game's ratings. Had it not used the Kinect, it could have been decent to above-average at worst.
- Sequel Difficulty Drop: Instead of Permadeath, the game simply return you to the previous checkpoint (or the beginning of the mission) upon being killed. However if your named crewmates are KIA by the time the mission is finished, they will be replaced. And almost all of the crewmates are unique —until all of them are dead and you are getting characters codenamed "Meatbag" or "Meathead."
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Regarding the Kinect as the new controller, taking away both the novelty of piloting a complex mechanism through immersive tactile means, as well as any form of tactile control.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The unique ideas behind the setting involving the Datacide and World War III being fought with Diesel Punk Mechs are wasted on the main story due to how short and simple the missions are and how the story itself is far more focused on rehashing World War II cliches.
- Waggle: Widely considered what singlehandedly sank an otherwise impressive-looking, conceptually exciting mecha game. Steel Battalion being a series famous for requiring extreme precision and control to play with simply did not work with the Kinect, which is incredibly finicky and near-impossible to exert any form of dexterity, with practically any motion causing you to execute any number of random actions except for the one you actually want to do.
