Sector G

Two superpowers sent colonists to an Earth-like world and settled its most hospitable region, which they called Sector G. The colonies grew into towns and the towns into a society: residential buildings and terraced farms, fabrication halls and cooling towers, landing sites, comms towers, and the hydrogen depots that fuel it all.

Now the two nations are at war, and the machines that built the colonies have been turned into mechs. The survey scanner became the sensor feed you see through. The demolition laser became a weapon. The cargo lifter became a tractor beam, and the survey drone flies over the battle instead of the building site. The armor was made to sit beside a reactor and shed its heat.

The machines are taking apart what they built.

Nobody sees the real world. You see what your mech's sensors make of it: a black void rebuilt as glowing lines, colored by what the machine thinks each thing is. Ground is blue fading to violet, structures are gold, trees and vehicles are green, anything fired is red, and mechs burn magenta. Take damage to the head and the picture starts to lie.

You're in the head, fifteen meters up. The head turns slower than your hand, so you move an aim cursor and the view follows it; turn far enough and the legs come around too. Every step is a lurch and a footfall you feel in the camera. Starting takes seconds, and so does stopping.

The HUD is drawn by the same sensor: your mech's damage diagram, a heading tape, radar, target brackets that read MECH · 62% or STRUCT · 40%, the weapon slots, a kill feed, and each player's handle over their mech. Press X and the sensor goes x-ray: buildings turn to glass and you can see what's moving behind them.

The drone lifts off your back and you fly it over the streets, thirty meters up, until you call it off or its battery runs out. Hold its sight on a mech and it locks on; fire, and a device flies over that mech and pins it in a tractor beam, walking at a tenth of its pace for twenty seconds or until someone shoots the device down. Its EMP scrambles every sensor in reach. Your mech stands where you left it, and it can still be shot.

And then there's the hydrogen depot. Its spheres burst in a chain, reach ninety meters, fell the buildings near them, and throw mechs off their feet.

• Deathmatch, free for all, 2 to 10 players: first to the kill limit, or the most kills when time runs out. Set your own limits when you create a game.
• Quick match: join a game from the list or start one; make it private and send the link. Rematch from the end screen. Drop out, and you have thirty seconds to get back to your own mech.
• The maps are square colonies, 500 m across for 2 to 4 players and 700 m for 5 to 10. Each one is among the best 24 of a thousand generated at its size, judged for fair spawns, cover, routes and reach.