10 Video Games With Totally Unique Combat

1. Steel Battalion

To this day there's not been a weirder, crazier, more unique control scheme in a game - that was officially released anyway - than Steel Battalion.

Capcom's 2002 mech combat simulator could only be played with a custom, 40 button, £200 controller you had to buy with the game. Do so and you'd get an array of switches, knobs, dials and buttons to fire weapons, control movement, tune your radio frequency and much more, alongside three foot pedals, to aid in sheer immersion.

There was even a red "escape" button to eject from your mech, which if you didn't push in time before exploding, would wipe your game's save and restart you from the beginning.

That, is how much Capcom wanted you to "believe" you were piloting a real mech.

Understandably, Steel Battalion became a cult classic overnight, and remains a game built from the ground up for a very specific consumer. Actual reviews were mixed but fairly positive, and the game marks a point in gaming history where - as the PS2 collectively dominated the globe - studios were greenlighting the most wide-eyed of pitches, just because it felt like the sky was the limit.