Gun Metal

Gun Metal is a 2002 vehicular action game developed by Rage Software — the Liverpool studio of Rocky and the Incoming games — released for the original Xbox on June 28, 2002 in Europe and August 1 in North America (published by Majesco), and ported to Windows in 2003. It holds a Metacritic score of 63 on Xbox, a review spread from X-Play’s 2/5 to Official Xbox Magazine’s 7.9, and a fate that overshadows both: Rage Software went bankrupt in January 2003, six months after launch, leaving Gun Metal as one of the studio’s final games and a title that spent most of the next decade out of print. Its one unforgettable idea survived all of it. You pilot the Havoc Suit, a ten-meter combat mech that transforms into the Havoc Jet on a single button press, mid-battle, as often as you like.

It should not be confused with Gunmetal, the 1998 Mad Genius mech sim, or the later Gunmetal Arcadia; this is the Rage game — now, improbably, a Very Positive $2.99 Steam title with a devoted retro following.

Technical Specifications

Helios Under Invasion

The human colony world of Helios is attacked by an alien fleet, and its defense rests on the Havoc program — experimental transforming war machines, of which you fly the prototype. The fourteen missions escalate from base defense and convoy escort to assaults on enemy strongholds and capital ships across open, destructible terrain; story is minimal, briefings do the talking, and the setting exists to give the suit things to knock down. That it does generously — buildings crumble, trees snap, and the Xbox version’s scale and draw distance earned the game its best press in 2002, when transforming between a stomping mech and a strafing jet over a collapsing city looked like nothing else on the console.

Mech, Jet, Repeat

The transformation is instant and tactical rather than cosmetic: the mech is the precision form — stable footing, heavier guns, a jump-jet for repositioning — while the jet is fast, fragile, and the only way to catch airborne enemies or cross a map in time. Each form carries four of a 24-weapon roster — pulse cannons, napalm, harpoons, rocket pods, mortars — chosen before each sortie, so loadout is half the mission. Reviews of the era split on everything but the suit: the transformation and visuals were universally praised, while the difficulty (brutal, with sparse checkpoints), mission repetition, and a camera that fought the jet form drew the low scores. The 63 is that split averaged; the 86% on Steam, two decades later, is the audience that was always going to love a transforming mech game regardless.

Rage, Funbox, and the Second Life

Rage Software’s collapse in January 2003 orphaned the game — the PC port limped out through regional publishers over the following two years, and for a decade afterward Gun Metal existed only as used Xbox discs and increasingly incompatible CD-ROMs. UK publisher Funbox Media, which picked up a slate of Rage’s catalog, brought it to Steam and GOG for $2.99 — DRM-free on GOG, Steam Cloud and trading cards on Steam, bundled with five other Rage titles — and the re-release found the audience the 2002 launch missed: Very Positive from more than 600 Steam reviews, the consensus being “exactly the dumb, loud, transforming-mech fun it promises, for the price of a coffee.” The original Xbox version is not backward compatible on later Xbox hardware.

Where to Play It Today

Gun Metal is on Steam and GOG for $2.99 — GOG regularly drops it to $0.75 — and as part of Steam’s six-game RAGE Software bundle; it runs on modern Windows with the usual PCGamingWiki-documented tweaks for resolution and controller mapping, which matter here since the jet form was built for a gamepad. The Xbox original survives only on disc and original hardware. For two hours of a mech becoming a jet becoming a mech over a burning alien colony, there is still no cheaper ticket.