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.

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.

The Good
This is the best of the three MechWarrior games. And I'm not talking about the graphics, yeah, their great, but that's not the important part. It's the feel of the game, the ease of control of the mech (and the cusomization of how you can control it.)

The Bad
The only thing I would have liked to see in this game was a more non-linear mission structure like in MW 1. I wish game designers would get it in their heads it is just NOT FUN to be forced to play the same scenario over and over and over until you get it right to move forward! (A lesson I have learned and have strived to avoid in all my games since.)

The Bottom Line
The best MechWarrior game out there.

The Good
Right from the opening cinematic you can tell that playing this game will be like opening one extra large can of whoop ass...the fighting is explosive, with huge war machines going at it with missles, lasers, and cannons.

The mission variety is pretty good...Yes, it has its share of the regular old "eliminate all threats in the area", but some missions are refreshing, and the salvage system keeps you on your toes and attentive to where you are hitting.

The visual and audio effects are stunning...hit a mech with a PPC, and that part will be faintly glow blue for a while, shoot a limb off of a mech and you can see wires hanging out of the mech...Explosions are beautifully rendered, and missiles leave realistic smoke trails...the battle chatter from the radio makes you feel like you are actually sitting inside of a mech, and the sound effects and music really immerses you in the game...

Heat management has been drastically improved and adds to the strategy...You can flush your coolant, and fire from water to keep your heat from rising too quickly...the MFB's are a nice touch as well...reloading ammo, coolant or refitting damaged parts have never been easier...

The weapon variety and balance have made the game very challenging multiplayer wise...everything has its use (except for the flamer...I have no idea why they keep putting it in the game everytime when no one uses the damn thing), and the accessories like AMS, narc beacons and the targeting computer fill the battle with new tactics and surprises...

The mission briefing is the best in the business, period...while the mission data is loading, you can already be planning your moves, as the tactical map is right on the screen...flyby drones and your mission coordinator makes the planning stage a snap by providing you with usefull information such as enemy placement...

Your lancemates, are quite helpful, as opposed to most other teammate AI in the gaming business. They are quite capable of keeping themselves in one piece, and enemies off your back while you go for a quick reload in the MFB...granted, they are not as good as humans, but if you give them the right orders, they will bring in their share of the kills...

The Bad
The game has a serious location damage problem...anyone can strap on some autocannons and win by blowing off people's legs. This creates the extremely unrealistic scenario of an assualt mech getting the crap blown out of it in one alpha strike to the leg by a wimpy little light mech with autocannons...that however, can be circumvented if all players agree to hit "above the belt"...

Jumping has some serious disadvantages...Although it looked pretty cool in the cinematic...Death From Above was such supposed to be a kick ass move, but most people only end up using jump jets defensively, to avoid missiles. I think the developers should have put more into jumping and make it a lot more powerful than it is...

The campaign is totally linear...If you screw up, you gotta play it over and over and over and over...maybe players could decide to move on, with some penalties of course, like more enemies next round...but having a total linear campaign turns many gamers off...Also maybe if players can choose to play the Clanner side...that would increase the playability of the game by leaps and bounds as well as let the players get into some clan mechs that they weren't able to salvage...

Lancemate commands can be improved and more specifics should be added in, like "attack from far range with ER laser", or "conserve ammo," or "automatically rendezvous with MFB when all parts are in/past condition yellow"...this could add much more depth into the game, and you as a lancemate can execute better missions...

The Bottom Line
Mech fighting at it's best...there is so much action that the FPS fan in me really got into this kind of gaming...FASA has a real winner on its hands, and for those of you who are into "bigger is better," MechWarrior 3 has bigger guns, bigger mechs, and gives you a bigger bang for your buck than the any Earth/Starsiege game or any other Mechwarriors in the series...

The Good
Well, I have to thank ATI for getting me into Battletech. My ATI video card came with an ATI version of MechWarrior 2, and I loved it so much I got the BattlePack version of MW2, MechCommander, and then I got MW3 as soon as it came out.

This is easily the best Mech game I've ever seen, and it has some of the best graphics of any game I know of. The game runs smooth as silk, and the sound effects are really impressive. The voice acting is good, the choices of Mechs are great, and the multiplayer rules. It can use the Joystick/Mouse combination of controls that MW2 had for legs/torso twist, which I love. You can also customize the controls.

When your Mech is hit by bullets, it will pitch over, and can actually fall over if the conditions are right. This is a real pain, but it adds to the realism. Also, if your leg is damaged, it will limp. :) The MFBs (Mobile Field Bases, which let you rearm & repair) are really nice. I wish MW2 had had them!

The Bad
Even though the voice acting is good, the storyline is hard to follow, typical of the other MW games I've played. Basically, I end up finally getting the story after playing it through about 3 or 4 times.

It would have been nice to be able to play on the Clan side. But I guess that would have doubled the price, huh? :)

And even though the graphics and sound are great, I wish the "results" of the impact of the projecticles would be more realistic. I'm waiting for a Mech game that shows bullet holes in the Mech! Also, when missiles hit, they make a big ol' crater in the ground. Now that's neat, but the craters are like perfect circles... it seems like they shouldn't look so "sculpted".

Even though patches have tried to rebalance the effects of the weapons, I still think bullets knock Mech's down too easily.

Also, the single-player is too easy to win. They need to have more enemy Mechs coming at you!

The Bottom Line
You definitely should play MW3 if you are interested in Mech games. It's awesome!

The Good
Terrific graphics, and good control. The missions, while not astounding, were varied and fun. Multiplayer is good, but a lot of that comes from the fact that you're able to play in FASA's universe rather than any outstanding move by the developers. The environment is great, and you can interact (blow up) many of the things in it. Weather and terrain really make a difference. Finally, it captures the feel of the board game better than its predecessors.

The Bad
Fairly short. 20 missions aren't really enough, and while they are fairly varied for this type of action game, they're rather dry compared to missions from MechWarrior 2. The enemy AI can be somewhat braindead at times. The initial release was somewhat buggy, and had a serious multiplayer issue -- you could shoot off one of someone's legs and they'd die immediately.

The Bottom Line
While not as much sheer fun as MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries (for me, at least), it captures the feel of the board game quite well. If you don't care about the differences between an autocannon/20 and a medium pulse laser, though, MechWarrior 2 is probably a better bet if you haven't played it already.

The Good
Good graphics, decent net connectivity, plenty of weapons and mechs, good briefing videos, good mech design interface, good missions (those that are there).

The Bad
Horrendous AI (you can snipe at enemy and they don't chase you). AI relies on triggers, so if you avoid the trigger, nothing happens. Horrendous interface to manage MFB inventory, nothing's sorted. Too few maps, too few missions (only 20). No mission editor, no mission saves. Inability to export/import the custom mech configs to share with others.

The Bottom Line
MW3 is better than Mechwarrior 2, but it's merely an evolutionary step forward. The story is less grand (you're just a grunt raiding the Clans), and game mechanics are nearly identical. The ability to gain salvage is fine, but the interface to manage the salvage is horrendous. The rest of the game is filled with "could have been better" things like that. If they had just spent a bit more time on it... It's worth playing, sure, but it could have been much better.

The Good
In the past I have looked at this series many many times in the stores. but never quite picked one up. If Mech 3 is a standard then I might need to pick up some old copies of Mech 1 and 2. It is rare that I overlook a jem like this for so long. So it heighted my pleasure to play this great game. Great weapons good control ease of use, all qualities of excellent games. On an odd note I own a system that has a cd-rom and a burner, D and E respectively. When I have Civ II in drive D and Mechwarrior 3 in drive E and play mech something interesting happens. During the game it plays music from the civ game. WEIRD!!

The Bad
Too many weapons that are almost completely the same. No in game info about equipment. Teammates can walk through you (wow I must have missed that section in the manual that talks about matterless armor.) Often when refitting in basecamp teammates will get caught in with the mlb's.

The Bottom Line
Good game with a few flaws that dont take away enough to negate the fun.

The Good
Compared to both its prequels and sequels, MW3 is probably the most physically realistic MechWarrior game. Autocannons create recoil; missiles blind you in their backwash; you can be knocked over by weapon impacts, and it feels like you're actually off balance (as opposed to the other 'Mech games, in which you might fall after a certain quantity of damage is dealt to you in a short length of time, but you have no real warning). The designers of this game did a remarkable job with the physics and graphics, to say the very least.

The missions were also set up brilliantly. Unlike all other MechWarrior and MechCommander titles, there is no form of money in MW3; you have to scrap everything you use. And you can't hold everything you come across, so you will have to decide what you need and what you don't.

The environment effects are far more diverse than what you'll find in any other MW title as well. Buildings don't just explode; they crumble. Trees burn, water slows you down more as you get in deeper, and 'Mechs will explode if overheated beyond a certain point. A whole lot of attention was placed in making this 'Mech game the most realistic, and it seems like the sort of idea that would pay off...

The Bad
...except that it didn't.

There is a reason why MW4 refused to adhere to the realism of MW3: It didn't help the gameplay. The first major flaw involves the Autocannons, which, as I described earlier, have recoil. The first thing you're going to say when you pop off a few shots with this weapon is 'cool!', but don't get too excited: The recoil, especially if the weapon is mounted on an arm, is sufficient to throw the torso into a spin in the middle of firing the three-round burst, thus throwing off your otherwise brilliant shot.

While this looks cool at first, in gameplay it's frustrating. Unless you mount two autocannons, one on each arm, the recoil effect makes your heaviest starting weapon almost pointless. Do I prefer it over the unremarkable, beam-style autocannon shot in MW4? Probably, but just barely, and MW4 doesn't force me into odd autocannon configurations just so that I can land a shot.

The crumbling buildings are pretty cool, but there's a pretty serious issue which stems from the AI behavior. Your allies follow behind you, or can be directed to Nav points. But they don't have very good sense, and there are lots of dangerous things that shouldn't be stepped on or bumped into - mines, collapsible bridges, etc. The AI is inexplicably attracted to these dangerous things and getting them to avoid hazards is nearly impossible. In some missions, I feel less like a lance commander and more like a babysitter. Especially since there are only three allied pilots in the game, and if one dies, well, that's it, you can't have a full lance.

The biggest, boldest reason why realism doesn't pay off involves 'Mech movement. MW4 ended up being superior simply because it was fun to pilot a 'Mech; the torso could rotate with the mouse in order to strafe targets. All 'Mechs had a rotating torso. Guess what? Not here. The torso is fixed, which means that you have to snipe your opponents or make 'bombing runs'. All it really does is prevent you from moving while you fire, which means you just move from place to place, stopping to kill something, then continuing along.

This - and the terrain for most of the game, which is wide open and flat - simply encourages you to load up with the longest-ranged weapons possible. Sitting in one place and firing can be accomplished from 800 meters or 50 meters just as easily; the difference is that, at 800 meters, you're a lot less likely to be hit in return. And the enemy rarely has the sense to rush you, preferring to engage the same way you do, by stopping and firing.

Around the last few missions, you'll find yourself facing 'Mechs which have similarly long-ranged loadouts. Though the expansion would fix this using a 'light-amplification' feature, some of these missions take place at night, and the game designers decided that this means a 'fog of war' has to be placed at roughly 500 meters. So you can lock onto an enemy, and even see your target reticle turn red when it passes over the enemy, but you can't see the enemy unloading its ordinance in your face. It's mildly frustrating, to say the least.

The Bottom Line
Every now and again I return to this game, play through a few missions, and stop at a reasonable point to continue playing MechWarrior 4. This game could've been brilliant, but it's also a lesson in how realism doesn't necessarily improve gameplay.

The Good
First of all, when I put the game in, I was blown away by the graphics. They are still pretty good today. Very realistic Mech responses make the game even better.(Shoot a mech in the leg, it will limp). The gameplay also is very good. You can twist your torso,and target indiviual parts. The mech customization is also very good. The sound is crisp and solid.

The Bad
The AI is where this game really stumbles. If you stay far enough away, you can bombard them with missles from extreme long range and all they do is continue their normal behavior. Some bugs also make the game less fun. Aside from the classic " fall through the ground", (very rare) every time I load a certain mission, the game crashes.

The Bottom Line
A solid game with excellent grapics and terrific sound. It has every thing a great game needs except good AI. The AI is very poor. If you are a fan of Mechwarrior, then this is a must have. If you are not, this is merely an average game.