What Battle Engine Aquila is
Battle Engine Aquila is a military action game set on a flooded world where the Forseti and the Muspell are fighting over the last scarce resource left: land. You play as Hawk Winter, pulled from obscurity to pilot the planet's most powerful battlecraft, Aquila. The machine works both airborne and on the ground, and you switch between those modes as the fight demands. Your firepower and your tactics have to work together, because the decisions you make about where and how you launch an offensive shape each engagement and, over time, the direction of the whole war. The campaign runs through a branching storyline of 43 missions with advanced variations, fought across 12 large, detailed islands.
Playing it with friends
The game supports split-screen multiplayer for playing with or against a friend, with three modes: Skirmish, Versus and Cooperative. Skirmish and Versus let you take each other on, while Cooperative puts you on the same side. Beyond the two of you, the battlefield is crowded: nearly 50 types of friendly and enemy units fill out the ranks, including land troops, aircraft, sea vessels and tanks. Aquila itself carries 10 different weapons with mass destruction capability, so the choice of what to bring to a fight matters as much as where you bring it. Remote Play Together is listed as a Steam feature, which is worth knowing if you plan to play over a distance rather than on one screen.
Before you start
This is a game about reading a battlefield and committing to a plan, not just holding a trigger. The branching mission structure means your route through the campaign is not fixed, and the advanced variations give missions more than one shape. Expect large-scale engagements where friendly and enemy armor, aircraft and ships all share the field, and expect to spend time on both aerial and ground approaches in the same mission. The tags cover first-person and vehicular combat alongside mech and tank fighting, so the perspective and the vehicle handling are core parts of the experience rather than side features.