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.