Even though Michael Bay’s efforts to reinvent the Transformers saga ultimately boiled down to overzealous attempts to instigate seizures and hightail away with naive purists’ money, long-standing mech battle franchises within the gaming world, most notably Armored Core, have demonstrated that there’s still plenty of life in the noble art of robot warfare.

Hoping to breathe fresh life into the mechanical mayhem are Small Impact Games, a development studio located in the pleasant suburbian outreaches of Leamington Spa, England. They’re stepping up their development campaign for M3CH, a truly spectacular-looking title in the pipeline for an iOS release.

Defined by the development team as a sci-fi third-person shooter, M3CH is set to feature both a sizeable single-player component alongside what appears to be its proverbial bread and butter – arena-based competitive multiplayer. We’re also told to expect a healthy dose of wave-based action against streams of belligerent AI opponents in the game’s Scavenger Mode, in which players can effectively ‘gamble’ away the mech parts accrued in the other game modes as they attempt to retrieve even more items and utilities for their troubles.

The game is currently being developed on the foundations laid out by the Unreal 3 Engine, accounting for the hugely impressive visuals seen in the video footage above. And while it’s already looking to be a graphically behemothic concept at this stage of proceedings, Small Impact have become the latest studio to take to Indiegogo in an attempt to secure additional public funding to support the game’s ongoing production. They’re looking to raise $25,000 in order to support the development of a a high-quality iOS Beta version of the game, with a fundraiser deadline of May 19th set in place. The studio is also weighing up the prospect of a PC release if enough funding is secured, although the game’s primary development platform is likely to remain rooted in Apple’s mobile service.

More information and updates can be found on M3CH‘s Facebook page.

Fans of sci-fi, mechs and third-person shooters; gather! M3CH has been announced by Small Impact Games and the concept art is breathtaking, the dubstep soundtrack…well, that depends on your taste. The prototype of the game looks to be coming along pretty well though, that much can be said.

It is of course early stages still for M3CH, but what has been displayed so far is rather promising. It’s a stompy mech game and they often prove popular, it contains a bespoke dubstep soundtrack which is proving popular at the moment too. But the real stunner is the game’s concept are. But we can’t judge a game on that alone so let’s look at the gameplay details.

It’s a third person mech shooter with arena based single and competitive multiplayer action. Scavenger Mode is a wave based survival game type and there will be opportunities to gamble your in-game winnings in deathmatch arena matches. We can’t really go into more details than that at the moment but if you’re sold on the game then you can help fund its development via its Indie Go Go project.

You can find out more details on the game via a development thread that the developers have set up which contains plenty of gorgeous artwork to please your eyes, so go and have a gander at that too. Otherwise, stick around here and watch the game’s pre-alpha trailer:

M3CH will be released on iOS devices initially, but the developers are hoping to bring to to PC via Steam in the future.

You can find out more information on M3CH over on the aforementioned development thread on the Indie Go Go Project.