Mech Mine Marvel!
It seems like a one-sided fight at first: a Raven taking on an Atlas. The very concept conjures up images of the mighty Atlas swatting down the annoying, flittery Raven. No one suspected that the Raven had anything more than monkey meat for a brain, nor did anyone suspect the Raven of packing a Flamer instead of the stock Small Laser. The wee Raven ran literal circles around the hulky Atlas, spewing generous jets of flame, managing slowly but surely to whittle the mighty Atlas into a pile of smoldering, crackling chunks of ferro fibrous and silicon (no bone and sinew here).
Right there, that's the essence of Battle -tech. Strip away the Roman Empire–inspired politics or the Mongolian-style invasion plot line. Disregard the fact that these titanic tanks-with-legs were used in field skirmishes like any other military vehicle. What Battletech ultimately boils down to is a 30th-century rendition of gladiatorial combat, a one-on-one match where swords and chariots are re placed with PPCs and autocannons, and superior tactics and knowledge of your opponent yields victory.
MechWarrior 4: Vengeance (Mech4) captures most of that essence. There are some significant problems that will bother veterans of the series and possibly newbies, but ultimately, it does a fine job of bringing Battletech to its roots.
Paper Hero
For a series rich with history and backstory, the narrative of this game leaves much to be desired. There are the requisite elements of a Battletech story. You're part of House Davion. Through a series of political maneuvers, your father, the Duke, gets offed and control of the planet falls to your treacherous House Steiner kin. So you're going to spend the campaign hopping around the planet, inciting revolution, and staking your claim on what is technically your planet.
Sadly, those elements are crippled by some of the most embarrassing full-motion video (FMV) acting in a game to date. Let me sum marize 90 percent of the FMV in this game: a series of postage-stamped-sized talking heads babbling about all manner of seem ingly inconsequential gibberjabber before each mission. If my integrity as a critic didn't require me to sit through all this, I would've simply skipped it and gotten right into the game. It made me long for the textual newsbriefs of MechWarrior 2 (Mech2), back in the day. In the area of dramatic intrigue, the ball was dropped — hard — for this installment.
Bye-bye Mars
The campaign, composed of 26 linear missions, is fairly good. You end up hopping around various environments on the planet, with three to six missions taking place in each area. Mech 4 does a good job of scaling up the difficulty environment-wise, starting you off in heat-friendly moon and ice locales before ramping up to places like the desert or the crowded city.
The missions are unique and varied; not bad, since it's all essentially "run around and kill everyone who isn't you or your friend." The missions do a good job of making you feel like a part of something bigger; this is largely due to the use of vehicles other than Mechs. I particularly liked the mission in which you must evacuate a town under siege by a pair of battleships, or a desert mission in which you must hunt down and capture a set of supply barges traveling down a river. Both enemy and allied vehicles help give you the sense that you're a cog in a massive war machine, rather than just fighting in a Mechs-only vacuum. While the campaign is a bit on the easy side and doesn't quite approach the brilliance of, say, Ghost Bear's Legacy for Mech 2, it's a huge step up from MechWarrior 3's forgettable campaign.
Symphony of Light
Graphically, Mech 4 is beautiful, with only a few snags. The screens speak for themselves. As for the gameplay, longtime MechWarrior veterans may be surprised to see that their sim has morphed into an action game with sim elements. But don't trade in your joystick for a mouse/keyboard combination just yet (in fact, when I unplugged my joystick, the game went into some sort of hyperactive state of confusion, where my Mech blindly ran around, unable to focus on any one thing). The slower, more methodical battles now give way to faster pacing and play.
For example, it's often better to play in third-person camera mode, rather than from the cockpit (which is mostly just the HUD slapped on a minimal "physical" cockpit). There's no tactical map. Heat management, even in the desert, has much less emphasis. Unless you're firing haphazardly, you shouldn't heat up very much. Chain-firing — a staple in earlier games due to heat management — has been eliminated in this installment. The pacing and feel is a lot faster as well: Mechs sprint around the landscape rather than meander around. Speaking of legs, you can no longer blow individual ones off. Rather than one-legged Mechs hopping around like bunnies, legs are either both there, or both gone.
Overall, AI is mixed. The enemies can be a crafty bunch, yes. They know which weapons to use at any given range, they use the terrain to their advantage, and they've even learned how to zip around on their jump jets. Your lancemates, on the other hand, are navigational nimrods. While most enemies are fine going over hills, your well-meaning lancemates will attempt the long and stupid way to get to a navigation point. Don't ever sprint ahead in a city mission, or your lancemates will get utterly confused in the sea of buildings. I'm both amused and annoyed at how a self-proclaimed sniper lancemate uses long-range missiles with skill, yet ignores a nice, flat valley in favor of scaling a near-vertical mountain.
Crisis Point
What will annoy veterans the most is the new MechLab. Gone are criticals. Now, weapons are hard-pointed, meaning that only certain weapons can be slotted into certain slots (with a few omni-mount exceptions). I understand this was to create balance and prevent people from making, say, missile boats in multiplayer. Hardcore Battletech geeks will be annoyed at how FASA's delicate balance has been disrupted. Yet this does make things easier for the newbie, and it levels the playing field. I remember being intimidated by the criticals system for Mech 2, and it took a while to get used to it. This new system maintains a sense of balance, is easier for newbies to adapt to, and consequently lets the game reach a wider audience.
Multiplayer is where the game shines. With the easier-to-use MechLab, the expansion of game types, and the tighter network code, it's honest-to-god fun to go out and start smashing Mechs online. While there is no co-op campaign, there's a lot more than vanilla Deathmatch; there's Attrition — which awards damage-inflicted, as well as kills — and the various team-based scenarios like King of the Hill or Capture the Flag. Even 56K gamers will have a very playable experience over the Zone, and giant free-for-alls rival Quake-style games in intensity and pacing. What starts as a brawl that resembles archived military footage can become a deadly, one-on-one dance where two Mechs test their piloting and tactical skill, and where, yes, a flittery little Mech like a Raven can take down titans such as Daishis or Mad Cat Mark IIs. If anything, the multiplayer matches most resemble the Mech brawls you'd have in those Virtual World Entertainment Centers (the places with the pods).
Dark Finale
While the single-player options vary from excellent to mediocre, it's the multiplayer that pushes this game into the "recommended" level. In retrospect of the entire series, it does have a different feel that may alienate hardcore, old school Battletech fans. Yet, for the most part, the changes make for better pacing and enhance what really is the heart of Battletech: tall robots smashing and shooting other tall robots. Veterans, look past the changes, and join the newbies in some good ol' massive Mech mayhem.
Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance
CGW Rating: 4 Stars
Pros: It's a beautiful rendition of gladiatorial, Mech-based combat...
Cons: ...hampered by changes that will annoy—or outright alienate—Battletech fans.
Requirements: Pentium-II 300, 64MB RAM, 650MB hard drive space, 3D card.
Recommended Requirements: Pentium III, 128MB RAM, GeForce 2 card.
3D Support: Direct3D
Multiplayer Support: 1-16 players via LAN, TCP/IP; one CD per player.
Publisher: Microsoft
Developer: FASA Interactive
Price: $45
www.microsoft.com/games/mechwarrior4/
ESRB Rating: Teen (13+); animated violence.
