MechWarrior 3

The Good
There are loads of games that drop you into the cockpit of giant warrior robots. The Mechwarrior series does it better than anyone else, and Mechwarrior 3 is arguably the best of the bunch.

Mechwarrior 3 definitely makes stomping around in a massive walking war machine a satisfying experience. This becomes apparent the moment the first campaign mission begins, when you find yourself standing in the water just offshore of a quaint-looking fishing village, which you may proceed to simply crash through, indiscriminately wading through boats and trampling huts as you pass.

That's what giant robots do, see? The primary goal here is to stomp/shoot things and blow stuff up. Targets come in all shapes and sizes, from stationary weapons turrets to tanks to other mechs. Tanks explode and buildings crumble, and the individual limbs of mechs become crippled or get blown off entirely. You can eliminate the threat of an enemy mech's weapons by severing the arms they're attached to, put them on the ground for good by taking off a leg, or just blow their heads off.

This all looks superb in action. The game makes Mechwarrior 2 look shameful, and is somehow graphically superior in many ways to Mechwarrior 4. Everything from the most massive mech to the tiny people scampering around down on the ground below (the latter of which may also be stomped) are well detailed and animated fluidly. Mechs are fully articulated, with legs, arms and torsos that move independently and realistically. Damaged mechs limp around, and after being knocked over by excessive shell impacts, laboriously pick themselves back up off the ground.

Taking care of business is all easy enough, despite the multitude of controls necessary to operate a mech. The basic movement functions alone are a handful: it requires not one (walking speed and direction), not two (torso pitch and yaw) but three (arm and weapon aiming) seperate sets of controls. Toss in weapons management and targetting systems and issuing orders to your AI team members ("lancemates") and suddenly you've got a lot to deal with in the middle of furball. Luckily the interfaces and HUD are streamlined and easy to read at a glance, and the controls can be remapped to your liking. A combination of keyboard/mouse/joystick is easier to manage than it might sound.

You'll need all of the controls available to react and adjust to changing situations. You can crouch and power down your mech to avoid detection by the enemy. When you do become engaged it often begins as a standoff affair with opponents launching volleys of missiles at one another, then switching to long range lasers or autocannons on approach, eventually utilizing short-range weaponry like machine guns and flamethrowers when things get up close and personal. Weapons can be linked together in groups and easily relinked on the fly to maximize your ammo and energy usage efficiency at different ranges. Do you use your ballistic weapons, which are running dry, or your energy weapons, even though the extra heat they're generating is threatening to overheat your mech? Just one alpha strike (a hotkey that fires all weapons simultaneously) would probably take out that guy's leg, but you'll overheat and shutdown for sure, and you're out of coolant...you risk damaging your mech if you manually override the automatic shutdown, but you can't usually afford to shutdown and leave yourself deaf, dumb and blind for too many tense seconds when you're surrounded. Maybe you ought to get your lancemates back here...These constantly evolving combat dynamics are what make Mechwarrior such an engrossing game.

There's a tutorial mode that efficiently lowers the learning curve. "Instant Action" is for those who just want to jump right into the mix, and the campaign mode starts you on a series of missions in a mediocre machine before you gradually gain access to better mechs, more weapons and equipment and your lancemates. A pretty stable multiplayer mode is also included, which is exactly the same as single-player except for the human opponents, and includes options that allow for distinctly different styles of head-to-head or team matches.

But before you set off on a rampage, you can stop by the "mech lab" and customize the configuration of your vehicle, as well as your lancemates'. There are several models of mechs ranging from hulking 100-ton behemoths to smaller, faster ones weighing in at "only" around 30-40 tons. After choosing a chassis, you've got a whopping selection of options to choose from in a variety of categories including, but not limited to engines, armor, "jump jets" (these things can fly--briefly), paint scheme--and weapons, weapons and more weapons. Mechs can be tailored to suit your preferred playing style, while a single decision made in the lab can sometimes unexpectedly get you out a tight spot or come back to haunt you at the worst possible moment (I knew I should've swapped that laser for extra AC ammo...). There's so much to do, you can easily spend as much time tweaking your mech to perfection as you do piloting it. Unfortunately, this is only partially due to there being so much room for experimentation...

The Bad
...because the pre-game interface is absolutely wretched. The arrangement of every menu is inconsistant with every other one and each is unintuitive in its own unique way. It all has an unpolished feel to it. The mech lab is a spectacular mess. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of components to choose from, but the game provides no data or descriptions at all. Newcomers to the Mechwarrior series are forced to discover the differences between a "(L) ER Laser" and a "(M) Laser (CLAN)" basically through trial and error. Moving many components off of or onto a mech is a painstaking, one-at-a-time process often involving scrolling up and down huge, unorganized parts lists. The same goes for the seperate "salvage" menu, where you must sort through the equipment found in the last mission and the parts you've got in stock--you can't just keep it all, as your stash of loot is limited by a weight cap. This is needlessly complicated by the fact that, while the mech lab lists each part's weight, the salvage yard does not. The list of frustrations here goes on and on. One last minor annoyance regarding the customization system is that, despite the outstanding mech models, each mech has only the one model, and that's it: the modifications made in the lab never alter a mech's appearance in-game. Say you've selected a mech that features a large missile launcher pod attached above one shoulder. That's simply what it looks like, regardless of whether you've equipped it with four launchers or none.

More troubles show up down the road. The game mechanics are hamstrung by holes in the AI that allow you to snipe away at enemies from long range until they're dead, without soliciting any reaction whatsoever. When you do get into a close-combat situation, the smallest mech can quickly incapacitate any larger mech by simply dashing up and launching a full salvo to blow off either of the bigger guy's legs. These issues don't severely impact battles with multiple targets, but in one-on-one or pre-emptive situations any sort of actual strategy goes down the pipes.

Physics can get quirky too, due sometimes to programming missteps and other times to questionable game design choices. There are occasional glitches that can bring gameplay to a grinding halt. Missile strikes, for example, leave craters in the ground. These craters are relatively tiny and small enough to be easily stepped in and out of, but once in a while they'll create some inexplicable sort of gravitational phenomenon that keeps "sucking" you back into the center of the hole even if you've made it several yards out. The only solutions are to either restart the mission or keep yanking the throttle back and forth until you've finally gained enough momentum to "break orbit" and step free of the crater. Bugs like these are infrequent enough to forgive, but there are more fundamental curiosities presented by the engine that seem to have been intentional. You can jack the throttle to maximum, get a running start and charge headlong into a building, cliff face, or another mech. That's fine. Oddly enough, this sort of thing doesn't incur the equal and opposite reaction you might expect, and off you go without a scratch. But I suppose in a world where hulking 75-ton machines can rocket up into the sky at a moment's notice and fly over a mountain, why not?

Did I say "mountain"? I probably meant "hill". There's only one planet in the game, and this planet doesn't sport much of a variety in the terrain department. It doesn't look bad, it just looks a lot alike, all the time. Sure, there are beaches, plateaus, winding cliff paths, rivers, caves and hills, but for the most part the landscape is rather bleak and brown and void of all vegetation save for a few dead trees. The individual mission boundaries are small enough and the action comes often enough that you won't have time to worry too much about it, though, and you won't encounter the endless expanses of barren, featureless desert that are prevalent in, say, the very similar Earthsiege series.

The lack of variety in the terrain is about on par with the uninspired mission design. Hearing your onboard computer warn "mech powerup detected" as you come around a corner is about as much of a surprise as you'll ever get. The campaign mode is a string of "go here, kill this, then go here and kill this" or "kill this before it kills this" sort of excercises. The missions are strictly linear, one after another, and quickly become repetitive. Missions requiring the destruction of buildings are particularly dreary as they demand long pauses in the action. In this case the only efficient way of completing one goal before proceeding to the next is simply standing motionless and squeezing the trigger until the building finally crumbles (but not firing too quickly, mind you, lest your mech overheat). The campaign ends rather quickly, without ever having involved any elements of character identity or cohesive plot whatsoever, unlike the first PC title in the Mechwarrior series.

The Bottom Line
With its deep level of control and customization, Mechwarrior 3 definitely leans heavily in the direction of a serious simulation, and might not be for some more casual gamers.

With a rough front end, some glaring gameplay defects and a lackluster single-player campaign that could have easily been a lot more than what it is, this is a game that never lived up to its full potential. Nevertheless, thanks to some excellent graphics, the depth of the mech customization feature and a unique, well-balanced combat system with the perfect mix of simulation and FPS action elements, Mechwarrior 3 is a solid, immersive game that reigns supreme over the, uh, giant robot genre.