After several months of running its own custom crowdfunding campaign without a great amount of success, Heavy Gear Assault developer MekTek Studios has launched a bona fide Kickstarter© to get things rolling. To drum up a little more enthusiasm for the free-to-play mecha shooter, it's released a short in-game snippet showing off its destructible environments in Unreal Engine 4.

MekTek was looking to raise $900,000 through its own crowdfunding doodad, but has only raised $127,167 since February. So now it's on Kickstater, looking for $800,000 to top that up and fund development.

That may be how much the game will cost Mektek, but it does seem an awfully ambitious goal. Most crowdfunding campaigns which push a million dollars are either connected to a big franchise in some way or made by a famous developer, and Heavy Gear is neither. Yes, yes, mechs are cool and the Heavy Gear name does carry a little weight, but $800,000 is an awful lot of money and many of the most devoted fans will have already pledged to Mektek's own thing.

Starting with a custom crowdfunding thing was also perhaps unwise. Kickstarter may take a cut of the money, but it's a familiar face--'Kickstarter' is almost a verb used for any crowdfunding now. That gets you more profile and, perhaps more importantly, makes people feel a little more comfortable about paying for something which might end up awful or perhaps even never happen. Sure, it's different if you're Chris Roberts, but MekTek didn't create Wing Commander, it's only best known for masterminding the free re-release of MechWarrior 4.

Right, yes, anyway. Heavy Gear Assault is an arena shooter which'll plop you into mecha suits to shoot other robots to earn fame and riches. It'll be free-to-play, which is perhaps another strike against it for many. But look, 'splosions: