'Silver Lining' is a column from freelancer Taylor Cocke dedicated to highlighting moments of real potential in less than perfect games. This week he examines From Software's Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor.
An interesting thing happened to me within the first hours of Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor. I started to actually care about the computer controlled soldiers confined to the chassis of my hulking Vertical Tank. Natch and Parker's voices would have been out of place as bad 80s stereotypes. But as the pair reloaded our tank's weapons, spewed tactical advice in my ear, and repaired our VT from encounters, I came to know them as more than chatty computer characters. They were compatriots.

And then I'd aim down the sites to see enemy tanks, and do my absolute best to keep myself and my team alive - a difficult feat due to Steel Battalion's atrocious Kinect controls. My enemies were mechanical monsters, sent to destroy everything that I held dear. In early cinematics, they were shown as faceless killing machines, slaughtering men, women, and children indiscriminately.

In war, one of the most powerful motivational techniques is dehumanizing your enemy. Dehumanization can also be accomplished through the use of technology. Aiming down a long-range rifle's night vision scope doesn't exactly focus on the human elements at the end of the crosshairs. Drone strikes do away with even having to look at the person being shot at. And in Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, the player is literally separated from enemy combatants by walls of steel. There is no defining human factor on the battlefield, only the game of war.