Astray

As the name might suggest, this unit is a Gundam! That means it's awesome. While I haven't reviewed many actual Gundam units, this one is easily my favorite.

Why?

Let's take a look.



This unit is essentially an Assault with a Heavy loadout. Lots of HP, boost, recharge, load capacity and incredibly quick emergency homing. The trade off is that speed is terrible. You're also looking at "Defense Mode" and asking yourself why it gets a boost (not shown, the armor jumps to a whopping 4k).

Well, the Thunderbolt Gundam gets a special mode that basically creates a moving fortress. The Gundam shrouds itself in 4 shields, thanks to the backpack manipulators, and suffers a movement penalty of 65% and cannot use any of its truly powerful weapons. The trade off is receiving 65% less damage from all sources, becoming unable to critical, and being unable to pick up containers/bombs for transport.

The weapons are pretty great. Beam rifle with high damage, shoulder mounted beam cannon with a zoom function, a shoulder mounted rocket launcher that acts like an AoE after it makes contact with something solid (turns choke points into an absolute nightmare) and some wrist mounted rockets.

Lots of weapons for a variety of playstyles but the biggest thing is the shoulder mounted rocket launcher. It can hit a whopping 11k damage, can be restocked and, as mentioned, creates an AoE that destroys grouped up enemies and excels at holding corridors.

The one drawback of this unit is that once you activate Defense Mode, you become a very slow target.

Also, here's a video.