Mech Commander

The Good
I like Mech games, and an RTS game with Mechs sounds pretty darned good to me! There's huge potential in this concept.

The Bad
Everything else.

Mech Commander really isn't an RTS game at all. RTS implies a degree of tactical and strateigc freedom to find solutions to problems; in Mech Commander, levesl are designed so that there's only one way to win, and you pretty much just keep playing until you can solve the puzzle. The puzzle-like gameplay is supremely frustrating and just completely unsuited to the whole concept; if I wanted to solve puzzles I'd buy a puzzle game. It doesn't help that, like most Mechwarrior games, the game comes with one linear campaign with a backstory about as exciting as double-entry bookkeeping. I'll be darned if I can understand why the Battletech line of games is so cursed with the "let's give 'em nothing but one lousy campaign to play, and let's make sure it's boring!" mentality.

There is no real impact in Mech design; if you have a bigger mech, you'll beat a smaller one.

The Bottom Line
Worth playing around with if you can borrow a copy. I hope the sequel's better.

The Good
What Mech Commander essentially does is take turn-based BattleTech and transpose it into a simplified real-time form.

The 'Mech customization is the most positive aspect of this game. Any 'Mech can be used in a long-range support role or as a close-range heavy hitter. You can re-define your platoon's strategy between missions, or mix-and-match for cross-mission tactical feasibility. You will find that planning out a mission is just as essential as how the mission is actually played.

And this is one of few games for which I can say that replaying a mission is fun. In fact, you will replay missions multiple times to reduce damage done to your 'Mechs, to maximize your salvage, and to find efficient ways to do what the obvious path would turn into an arduous and closely-matched battle. It's not just about strategy; it's about re-defining your strategy after your first strategy either failed or narrowly succeeded.

For an isometric 2.5-D game, the graphics are surprisingly good; 'Mech limbs can be blown off; 'Mech and vehicle explosions are sufficiently gratifying; though the weapon graphics more or less fall into three categories (the 'missile' shared by SRMs and LRMs, the 'bolt' shared by Autocannons and lasers, and the PPC animation), the speed and color of these individual weapons are sufficient that you'll see a wide variety of fire being exchanged during battles, keeping them original and entertaining.

The landscapes are also beautifully produced and meticulously designed in spite of a very simple template of terrain. The missions interact almost seamlessly with the terrain in which they are presented; you are frequently presented with a choice to burn through a forest or take the paved road, and sometimes burning through exposes a path you didn't know existed, but other times, it's just a forest. As a result, there's a lot of experimentation involved with each mission.

The Bad
As a result, the game is also a lot less spontaneous. Since the success of every mission has some bearing upon how well you did on the mission before it, you will usually end up making a 'dry run' of a mission in which you expose all the ambushes and terrain surprises, then replay the mission so the surprises are either evaded entirely or met with blunt force.

The game also inadvertently encourages loading out your 'Mechs with all Long and Medium range weaponry. Since the enemy force typically comes at you one little piece at a time, you get into the habit of packing all of your 'Mechs with the weapons necessary to break apart individual enemies before they can make a first or second shot. Even if the enemy gets into close range with one of your 'Mechs, this only forces your other 'Mechs to move back and surround the enemy with continued long and medium range barrages.

The necessity to salvage Heavy Clan 'Mechs early in the game, especially the Mad Cat in the third mission, means that you'll be replaying certain missions over and over again just to make the salvage. It feels arbitrary to kill something in the same way ten times just so that on the eleventh try you will be able to use it in the next mission. Don't even get me started on trying to salvage something with its valuable weapons intact.

If you're a die-hard BattleTech geek, you'll notice that the customization rules are hardly up to CBT (Classic BattleTech) standards. Though you can come up with 'Mech payloads which would be horribly illegal in CBT, you still can't customize ammo, and since your AI pilots don't understand why Gauss ammo should be saved for 'Mechs and not wasted on Savannah Masters, you will find yourself replacing those heavy, ammo-light weapons with energy weapons. It's too frustrating to deal with ammo when the pilots don't know how to conserve it, which is one of the biggest failings of a game built on directing AI.

There's one particularly frustrating bug in this game: Enemy gates will open for the enemies crowding around them, allowing your 'Mechs to enter. But once you've killed the enemies, the gate closes - sometimes on one of your 'Mechs, which kills it instantly.

The Bottom Line
This game is great for BattleTech fans, refreshing for MechWarrior fans, and very fun for RTS fans. For anybody else, it doesn't exactly have the pace of an FPS and not enough open-ended potential to count as an RPG. But I had a lot of fun with this title, and enjoyed it all the way up to the end credits.

The Good
The game is a fresh new way of gaming in the BattleTech universe. Instead of piloting a single mech, you are now commanding a lance (sometimes more) of mechs...

Mech Commander works like any RTS game out there, select some units, tell it to explore under the fog of war, or tell it to attack...However, there is no building in the game, nor is there mineral harvesting...You get resources from completing set objectives, and receive reinforcements from salvaging them, picking them up mid-mission and buying them...

The game has a huge variety of things to customize from, from choosing what mechs and vehicles to buy, to choosing the weapons to fit the mech with, to deciding which MechWarrior should pilot which mech...

The effects of each mission carry over to the next and your mech warriors can gain exprience and improve in rank and skill...Ranks are required to pilot mechs, and if a mechwarrior doesn't have a high enough rank, then the mech suffers a penalty...

The visual effects of the game are stunning...explosions look so beautiful that you might find yourself drooling, and the effects of weapons are realistic...your mechs limp when they are shot in the leg, and they leave foot prints when travelling...

The detail of this game is amazing...almost everything can be blown up...when your mechs lose an arm, it flies off, and you can see it lying on the ground...each mechwarrior has its own voice, and it makes the game more alive, as you feel like the warriors have a personality...

The commands that you give to you units are also very detailed...From the range to the attack to the location (ie head, leg, cockpit), you can specify it all...

The Bad
The linearness of the game is one huge flaw...even the missions themselves are extremely linear...You have to finish a mission before you go on to the next. The missions are very restrictive...there is one mission where if you do not use a mine layer, there is no way you can beat it...this saps the creativity out of being able to plan your mech battle tactics...

Also, your mechwarriors level up way too slowly...there are only so many missions in the game, and sometimes if the warrior is injured, you can't put him/her in...at the rate of them leveling up their skills, you become very hard pressed to find an ace pilot for that Atlas assualt mech that you have, but have a swarm of new green recruits that can pilot the only light mech in your inventory...

The Bottom Line
Very fun, but sometime you can't help but get frustrated at the linearness of the game