MechWarrior 3

The Good
Stomping around in a 50 foot tall robot is always fun, and I've always liked the Mechwarrior series. I was very excited to get my hands on this title, having played Mechwarrior 2 several years back I had high expectations. The graphics had been improved greatly since the last hit out, the hills roll on and your mech' leaves foot prints as you stomp across the map. Arms get blown off and leave mangled tentacles of steel while damaged legs cause limping and hamper your turning circles. The sound is fairly well done, I'm not sure if the computer voice is performed by the same person as in Mechwarrior 2 but it sounds similar and works rather well. Radio messages are all fairly well done but seem to lack any real urgency in them, especially the 'Need a little help here!" message. The mech' has convincing power up/down, warning alarms and rotation sounds. Some of the weapon sounds are spot on but others seem to be lacking something, unlike the walking sounds which really give you the impression that you are controlling something truly massive.

The Bad
Salvage plays a big part in the game, it dictates what weapons and ammunition you have available but it is handled in a pathetic manner. The salvage and stock list is no sorted at all, you have to search through the list to find the item you want to keep or to ditch then you can only select an item one at a time, weapons in any of a mechs' pre configurations are not included on the salvage screen, but still take up some of your salvage tonnage. Selecting items is done badly, If there are 5 ER Lasers (L) (Clan) you have to click 5 times, if you have 100 rounds of SRM 2 ammo you have to click 50 times to get rid of it all. You are limited to 900 Tonnes of salvage but no weights are listed for the items in the salvage selection, making it a guessing game to get the most out of you 900 Tonnes. This entire section could have been made far better with a 'drag and drop' interface, a sorting tool like on the mech' equip screen, check boxes to select all or a box to type a value of each item you want to allocate to trash or storage. Your Lancemates are fairly stupid, there is no formation select so they follow behind you in a column. There is only an attack my target command and mechs' will only attack a target on their own if someone attacks them. One annoying thing is stomping ground vehicles and ramming other mechs' does no damage, a 75 Tonne robot running at 80 MPH would certainly take some stopping, crushing puny APCs would seem an obvious result from such a collision. While the sound is fairly good the radio chatter causes the game to collapse, you receive both friendly and enemy radio messages, sometimes both at the same time but even when the messages aren't received at the same time, it's almost impossible to tell who is sending each message, sub titles are a must for this type of thing and show a glaring deficiency in the overall completeness of the game.

The Bottom Line
This game falls well short of being spectacular, but still manages to be fun. Look at the sequel or maybe even the similar Earth Siege series instead unless you're an obsessive fan who must own all Battletech related material.