Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance ReviewBy Blackclaw My favorite in the Mechwarrior series has always been Mechwarrior Mercenaries. I've always enjoyed the mercenary storyline in the Battletech universe and I hope that another computer game will be forthcoming to pursue that unsavory career. Mercenaries served up a great selection of mechs (with the exception of the Warhammer and beloved Marauder.. a pox on the lawyers that took them from us!) and offered us the first real chance at Mechwarrior multiplayer. Mechwarrior 3 came next and featured jaw dropping graphics. It was a solid game but it fell short of its potential. Mechwarrior 4 is the latest installment and it offers some of the best gameplay yet, but I feel that it could have been even better. I feel this way almost certainly because what it does do, it does incredibly well and I just wish the development team had been given a little more time to finish off what is, even in its present state, an incredible game. Game PlayLet's start out with a few things I had to deal with to even get the game going. Mechwarrior 4 uses direct X 8 and will offer to install it for you. A quick piece of advice, if you are using an NVIDIA RIVA TNT 2 video card like myself, make sure you have the latest drivers for that video card before you install direct X 8. It crashed me hard. Once I updated my video card drivers, everything was peachy. Let me also address the marketing team briefly. Play the damn game
before you come up with the ad campaign. One of the marketing themes for the game is "You are in command." This is bullshit. Your character in the linear campaign may be the commander, but you the player will have very little in the way of command. You will get to choose what mechs to bring along (although the number you can use is determined by the mission), you can choose which pilots to use, and you can decide whether you want to attack during the day or at night. That's the limit of your command. I had at least hoped you would be able to choose the order in which missions you go on in an operational theater, but you don't. The missions are chosen for you. You get no say in how the war is prosecuted. There are no strategic decisions for you to make. But I'm well known for not liking scripted linear campaigns because I hate having to play missions over and over. The first time I play a mission in any game its exciting. The second time its just repetition. If I wanted to do repetitions, I'd work out in a gym. On the plus side, the storyline is a good one and most the missions aren't too difficult. My dream is that they'll take this game and make a mercenaries edition for it with a dynamic campaign. On to the good stuff. There's a solid selection of mechs in this game including some old favorites like the Atlas, Catapult, and Madcat. (But no Marauder or Warhammer because lawyers have outlawed fun. Okay, so I'm bitter.) There are some new designs as well such as the Uziel and the Thanatos which has quickly become a favorite for me. There are twenty-one mechs in all. There are tons of weapons to play with. Everything from the standard laser and particle projection cannons to NARC beacons and a snub nosed version of the Long Tom artillery piece. Multiplayer play is incredibly smooth. It's so smooth that it's almost impossible to believe. Even with an ordinary 56 K modem I can jump into games with a 300 ping and suffer no ill effects from lag. I can count the number of times I've witnessed warping on one hand. It just doesn't happen that often. There is the occassional crash to menu, but the price is well worth paying for some of the most lag free gaming ever. A shrine should be built to the developer of the network code for this game. I was involved in the open beta testing for online play and I knew right away that we had a lot to look forward to. The terrain is well done and the type of environment you are in, be it snow, swamp, or desert, has a real effect on your mech's heat and thus it's ability to operate. Mechwarrior 4 is also the first in the mechwarrior series to offer computer AI to fight against in multiplayer. Finally you can team up with your friends against a computer controlled enemy lance. But it is also clear that the work on the computer AI in Mechwarrior 4 was not finished. Mechwarrior 4 offers some excellent multiplayer variations such as team verses team, attrition, capture the flag, steal the bacon, and king of the hill. But the AI only knows how to play in team verses team games or games in which everyone is against everyone. The AI isn't available in capture the flag, king of the hill, or steal the bacon. Nor can you play cooperatively on the campaign missions. It's a real shame because multiplayer AI could add a lot to our LAN games. I hope that through patches the AI becomes available in at least capture the flag so that the game can take it's rightful place among our other favorites such as Unreal Tournament. The potential for Mechwarrior 4 is just to great to pass up. Imagine the fun that could be had with a few more add ons such as a repair tool that one team member could equip his mech with to repair his teammates' mechs in the field. Mechwarrior 4 is certainly the best in the mechwarrior series so far. With just a little more effort, the game could reach a potential that has been unrealized in past games of this series. It certainly has me looking forward to what comes next. CustomizationEver since Mechwarrior 2, a hallmark of this series of games has been the ability to customize your mechs weapon loadouts. Mechwarrior 4 uses an entirely new system to try and balance out gameplay and solve visual effect problems that were sometimes caused by this customization. Now every mech chassis has certain number of weapon/equipment slots that are available for a specified weapon type - beam, missile, ballistic, or omni (any type). How large a slot is also determines how large a weapon, or how many weapons that position on a mech can take. So now, even if you have the tonnage available on your Shadow Cat mech for an autocannon 20 LBX, you still won't be able to mount it because the mech doesn't have a ballistic slot large enough for it. Overall, I like this system. It removes the problem of people mounting insane numbers of just one weapon type in an attempt to create the perfect specialized mech. It also removes the bizzare sight of
seeing laser beams coming out of a mech's rocket launchers. If the mech has an obvious rocket launcher be assured that only missile weapons will be able to be mounted in that postion. However, I
wish they had been a little more generous with the Omni slots. These slots allow any type of system to be mounted in that slot. It would have been nice to have more options available for some of the
mechs. A system that would have allowed either beam or ballistic weapons on a barrel weapon slot would have been ideal, since a cannon or a laser firing from a barrel position looks just fine. The
system in place limits the potential of some mechs. The system also means that in a case of equal tonnage mechs, a mech chassis with more slots is superior to one with fewer. The result is that the
biggest mech with the most slots is the supreme destroyer. And that mech is the Daishi and if you go
online you'll find that it is used by the majority of players. There are simply fewer options available to
come up with a design that can beat it. Although there is some play balance in the fact that the Dashi has very few missile slots. It can be beat at extreme long range, but you better be good. Fortunately players can set up servers with weight limits if they get tired of seeing the Daishi. Also the attrition multiplayer games give more points to the players using smaller mechs against larger mechs, so problems with the slot system is in no way a fatal flaw. Mechwarrior 4 also lets you create your own custom decals for your mech. You can set your mech to display your own personal insignia as well as that of your online clan, faction, or mercenary group. The server can be set to allow custom decals to download automatically so everyone else can see your spiffy decal too, plus you get to see theirs. The game comes with plenty to choose from if you don't feel like making your own. A mission editor was also planned, sadly it was not released with the game. Hopefully work is still being done on it and it will be available sometime in the future. The tremendous amount of replay that this would offer the game would definitely enhance the game's value and longevity in sales. GraphicsThe game's graphics feature some incredible sights. The mechs are very well animated and you will come to rely on the visual clues the game offers you when sizing up how badly damaged a mech is.
Mechs smoke when they are overheating, trail fire when badly damaged, and emit clouds of green gas when a pilot flushes his mech with coolent. Arms get blown off and mechs limp badly when their legs
have been damaged. CommunityThe best place to start is to head over to the official site at Microsoft games. Once there, head to the community section where you'll find links to fan sites and online clans looking for new recruits. Dropship Command is one of the best of those listed. For those of you with an expanded interest in mech related information, I highly recommend Bad Karma. It features a forum for mech related games as well as a host of information on other mecha related games, storys, and anime. RequirementsWe tested this game on a Pentium III 600 and an Athelon 700. Once we got the TNT2 video card drivers updated on the Pentium III machine, it ran the game quite well. The Athelon used a newly installed Geforce 2 card which combined with its ASEUS motherboard turned out to create a driver conflict in the game. According to the Mechwarrior 4 Readme, the issue is being worked by NVIDIA. In the meantime our Athelon has a tendency to crash randomly. We also ran the game on an AMD K6 2 350. Hell, we used the K6 2 as a server. The game ran quite smooth with medium graphic settings despite hosting three other machines. The minimum requirements for the game are a Pentium II 300, 64 MB of RAM, and at least an 8 MB video card that supports Direct X. We'd suggest using at least a 300 Mhz CPU of at least the Pentium II series or AMD K6 2 series, but a 350 Mhz would be better. Take the memory up to 128 MB and use a 32 MB video card. |
The terrain is quite pretty in some areas, especially in the desert where an
assortment of sandy browns and purples mix to please the eye. Some of the buildings in the game look a little like movie props close up, but the compromise allows
for smooth battles inside massive cities. There are also the occasionaly 2d sprite images of people or animals running along. The bird images look quite nice. But the
people and ground animals are too pixilated to enjoy. The explosions are very well done and light up the surronding area. The smoke trails from missile salvos do
an excellent job of drawing the player into the game. These smoke trails are often the first thing one sees as you approach an ongoing battle and their appearence is an ominous sign of impending combat.
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