Summary
The unsuccessful successor to Mechwarrior2.
The Good
Like most Activision games using this engine (i.e. the Mechwarrior 2 products and Interstate 76), Heavy Gear featured excellent graphics, sound, video cutscenes, and music. Additionally, the engine had been updated so that it supported 3D cards, the results of which rivaled most other cutting edge games on the market.
Overall, the roughly 30 campaign missions were varied and fun. The operations ranged from standard search and destroy, to protecting your landship (essentially a hovercraft similar to our aircraft carriers), to infiltration/intelligence gathering. They were not too difficult, but nonetheless proved challenging.
As with most fighting robot games, you can customize your gear. You could easily drag-and-drop various body parts and weapons with the well designed interface. One interesting aspect of this was that you could essentially use a heavy strider's legs with a scout gear's torso, although one would not do this as a practical matter. As you progressed further, more weapons, gears, and equipment were available.
During combat, your gear gear weapons were fairly well developed. Also, the game featured realistic damage model similar to Mechwarrior wherein specific parts of the gear were damaged depending on where it was hit -- thus, you could possibly lose an arm or other vital systems, and the gear would reflect that.
The Bad
Probably one of the most disappointing points of Heavy Gear was the 'feel' of the gears. Activision's marketing campaigns all claimed gears were smaller and more agile than the bots in the Mecharrior (which they should have been, since gears are actually glorified suits of powered armor), and that the game would play like a cross between the fast first person shooters such as Quake and the giant robot feel of Mechwarrior. In reality, the game did not play too differently from Mechwarrior, save for the fact that gears were a lot weaker.
Also, some of the weapons seemed under-developed, such as the plethora of mortars available. In the pen-and-paper RPG, these weapons might be effective against troops or small vehicles, but they were not too useful in the computer game.
Lastly, the gears depicted in the game did not look too much like the anime inspired artwork that the Heavy Gear universe is usually portrayed in. Rather, the gears were blocky like and not the smooth organic-looking robot armor suits.
The Bottom Line
Heavy Gear came as a result of Activision losing it's Battletech license from FASA, and it shows. The engine, while fantastic nonetheless, is suited for the heavy walking tanks of Mechwarrior and not agile gears. Also, while the campaign story was somewhat interesting, the overall game setting was not well developed and I did not at all feel compelled to pursue Dream Pod 9's Heavy Gear universe any furthur.
