MechCommander 2 Review

In the future, humanity spans over distant planets and systems. Unfortunately, it lost the sense of unity, which resulted in the rise of several "houses" that wage war one against other. The only thing that had a chance to unite humanity once again were Clans - groups of colonist outlaws which attacked the houses. However, the unity of houses was short-lived and it lasted until the threat was vanquished. You are a professional - a MechCommander mercenary with a task to do the dirty jobs for House Davion and House Steiner. Money is your only true master, and that makes you fairly detached from both of the houses who share a common problem...

Three years ago, Microsoft made a step that seemed fairly logical at the time: it tried to milk the popularity of gigantic robot combat gained by the FPS games of the MechWarrior serial, by using the same world in a RTS. This did not turn out to be a success - the first MechCommander was relatively poorly accepted, as it was full of major flaws. Three years later, we face its official sequel. The sequel corrects most of the flaws of the original game, but also introduces many new flaws, which are more conceptual than technical.

Even though MechCommander 2 is a full-blown RTS title, it still has strong role-playing elements. Your success in the game will primarily depend on the experience and equipment you gathered. The core of this game is in developing new technologies and improving the capabilities of your Mech pilots as they go through the missions.

Each mission starts with a briefing, where you get to learn of your mission objectives from the video-clip. During the whole game, objectives will simply link one to another... As soon as you think you completed a mission, a becoming yet brisk voice will inform you that you still have something to do. The objectives are varied, but still typical for this type of games: seizing control of a facility, destroying enemy troops or buildings, etc...

After the briefing, you still have one more thing to do before you can spring into action: You have to equip the Mechs themselves. At the very beginning of the game, you won't have sufficient funds to purchase a new Mech, so you will have to make do with what you've got. After each mission you will get some money to spend shopping. You will soon realize the importance of the two pre-mission segments. You will have to study your assignments carefully, and then purchase the needed equipment to load in your drop-ship! Heavily overloaded Mechs are not always a better solution than easily equipped dexterous robots!

Mechs can be equipped by weapons of your own choice, but not all weapons will be available at first - you will have to acquire certain weapons from enemy weapon production facilities. Finally, you will have to assign a pilot to each of the robots. I doubt you will change the pilots much in the game as they gather experience and become stronger, and are very hard to kill because they catapult out of a Mech when it explodes.

MechCommander 2 is a strategy game, but it has more than a fair share of action, in spite of the fact that you cannot directly control a Mech from its cockpit. You have to focus on completing your mission objectives and loosing as few robots as possible. You cannot buy or build new robots (You can salvage them though - Ed.), so when you lose all your Mechs, the game ends. There are resource points in the game, and you will get some of those at the beginning of each mission, or you can gain them by capturing enemy resource trucks and storage buildings. Resource points can be spent on summoning reinforcements from air, launching spy satellites, repairing your Mechs or artillery or calling in a salvage plane. Waypoints can be set separately for walking, running, and jumping movement modes. Units can be grouped and re-grouped, and you do the selection of these groups by using hotkeys. In contrast to the first part, where the poor AI made your Mechs completely passive, The AI in MC2 is making them hyperactive.

Being trigger happy and blood (oil?)-thirsty, they will keep looking for a fight, and you will frequently notice that some of your units are missing from their positions and having a great time fighting some enemies you have not even noticed. Don't get me wrong, AI is not too clever. Its biggest flaw is that the robots tend to stand when they reach their designated position and shoot at the enemy without bothering to take any evasive maneuvers. This can be fixed by assuming direct control of the Mechs, but it still should have been done by the AI.

You will be able to issue detailed orders in combat, like, for instance, making your Mechs only target at particular part of an enemy mech (so that you might later salvage undamaged parts), or to fire only when within a certain distance from the target, or even what weapon they should use.

Enemy structures can be brutally destroyed by tearing down their walls, gates and turrets, but also in more sophisticated ways: by destroying power generators or capturing the turret and gate control buildings.

Orders can be issued in the pause mode, but that proved to be very difficult and inconvenient. While you're in the pause mode, you cannot see the orders you issued, and when you want to enter it, you have to wait some time before the game responds to you're the Esc key.

Missions are strictly linear with fixed objectives and enemies that attack only if you enter their sensor range. The objectives have been set in a relatively logical manner, and you won't be able to use your intelligence to figure out a different way to complete the mission from the one that has been set. This can be quite annoying at times, especially in some missions where even the slightest action that doesn't agree with the great plan means certain failure. This makes the game's replay value null! After you finish a mission you get to see a well-made cut-scene and detailed report on your actions.

Just like in the original, MechCommander 2 also allows you to salvage parts, which is one of the key features of the game. As the game progresses, you will be able to customize and equip your Mechs with huge variety of different weapons and chassis, which should eventually result in you having your ultimate Mech. But what do you do with it once you got it? The game has no skirmish mode, not even an option to turn bots on in the multiplayer mode! The Mech you design will therefore only be useful in the campaign and multiplayer games. Apart from this, you will also be able to design your own maps or replay the campaign scenarios as stand-alone missions in order to test your creation.

The design of both robots and buildings is perfect, and this represents the game's main trump. The terrains can be a bit monotonous at times, but they are far from bad. I was really impressed by the level of detail on robots that can be seen when the camera is zoomed in. There is a line of sight, and this is an important element in tactical combat, especially in surprise attacks. The sound is generally good and improves the overall atmosphere. All the technical superiority of the game will only be seen on stronger machines, as the eye-candy dramatically affects frame rate.

MechCommander 2 is, unfortunately a game with no soul - a game that has been developed thinking strictly about its rational categories. As a result we got a technically polished title which made amends for all of the flaws the original game had, yet which is still far from appealing or capable of holding gamers' attention, and I'm speaking even of the hard-core BattleTech fans. The game has everything you can think of, but there is still something missing. This missing thing is usually referred to as playability.