First Impressions is this idea that popped into my head where, upon starting a new game, I give you my initial thoughts in a free-flowing stream of consciousness that is sure to make you wonder if I'm an escaped mental patient. Hopefully an escaped mental patient who knows his stuff as far as games are concerned.
Last night, I sat down with Front Mission Evolved on my TV and a never-empty rum-and-coke by my side. Square-Enix and Double Helix went in a different direction with this Front Mission game, eschewing the usual strategy-based style of mech warfare for a third-person shooter. You can still customize your mech, but victory will be determined by a quick trigger-finger instead of the ability to devise intelligent battle tactics.
You control a chap by the name of Dylan Ramsey, who works as an engineer in the field of creating wanzers (FM-code for mech). The game starts with a brief tutorial featuring Dylan testing a wanzer's ability to destroy stuff in a variety of ways. Fortunately "Tutorial Tedium" quickly comes to an end when forces attack New York City. Dylan starts babbling about how his dad's there and he's going to save him and the scene shifts from wanzer-testing to wanzer-fighting!
New York's become a pretty hostile place in the moments since this attack has begun. I got to blast tanks, infantry and other wanzers. You start with a machine gun in your machine's right hand and a missile launcher on your left shoulder. The gun is great against weaker enemies. Against tougher opponents, you'll want to shatter them with missiles. However, this does leave you open for a bit, as it takes a bit of time to lock on an enemy long enough to send a full allotment of four missiles its way. You can take damage to the arms, legs and torso. The torso auto-regenerates itself over time, but if it gets destroyed, it's back to the last checkpoint for you. You have to pick up health packs to head arms and legs, but the cost for having them smashed is much less severe than death. If your legs get destroyed, you move more slowly. According to the instruction book, having an arm smashed means that any weapon attached to it will be less accurate. So far, I haven't noticed much of a difference, but I won't claim that a handful of hours affixed to a game makes me an authority on every little detail.
While strolling through New York City (which, in the future, apparently is surprisingly linear for a metropolis), I found all sorts of amusement just by walking through things. There are cars, street lights and all sorts of things scattered around that go boom when I'd take my Wanzer and walk into them. When meeting up with a couple of military-types who became allies, they'd be yelling things like "Get over here!" and "Hurry!!", but I'd just ignore them, so I could walk around and break stuff. Heh...I'm easily amused.
As I explored, in order to run through every tree and crush every vehicle, I also noted there was a reason to explore as much as possible. Not only were there wads of money for my "wanzer-upgrading" fund, but also sensors to destroy and emblems to collect in order to achieve mini-objectives for additional rewards. I apparently wasn't too keen on making a thorough search, as I tended to not find many of these goodies, but they're there for those people who love collecting every little thing.
My military buddies were with me much of the time after joining me, but occasionally they would leave. One of those times set up the first boss fight against Marcus the Mercenary's wanzer. This battle served mainly as an introduction to E.D.G.E., which is Evolved's tool for slowing down time so you can inflict massive damage. It also was boring. Health and ammo re-fills regularly appeared on the battlefield, so this was basically a battle of attrition featuring me blasting away for a while, restoring health/ammo and repeating it all until the fight was over and Marcus left to fight again another day.
Eventually, things go south and you have two minutes to flee an area. This was kind of a neat little task. You'd have to use your energy-depleting hover-glide move (allows you to go faster) while speeding down corridors and collecting items to replenish your injury (as being slowed to the typical lumbering gait of a wanzer will NOT help you meet the deadline).
To segue between missions/chapters, you can visit the shop to buy upgrades for your machine. Speaking of which, I'll need to buy an upgrade to my television in the near future. The tiny text here is borderline unreadable on older SD televisions (something I've noticed to varying degrees on various games, but never to this level), which made me happy that you can purchase a couple of generic "pre-built" designs. My "medium assault" wanzer might not be as great as something I'd concocted on my own, but I didn't have to strain my eyes for 15 minutes while going through parts.
You start the next mission flying around in a gunship for a rail-shooting stage, where you have to clear out all the ground opposition before it's safe to land. The challenge is to not let enemies stay alive long enough to seriously whittle away at your ship's life bar. From there's it's back to ground combat (with a liberal dose of randomly smashing stuff thrown in, of course) in an island setting. This bit ends with another boss fight, this time against two wanzers whose drivers spend their non-combat time bickering about Sun Tzu's Art of War. Unfortunately, the general gist is the same as the first battle. Whittle away at a life meter while restocking health and ammo when necessary. More tedious than fun. Before I shut the system off for the night, I was preparing to exit my wanzer for some on-foot shooting action.
IN SUMMARY: Mech combat is reasonably fun. Destroying random items scattered around the levels gives me a bizarre amount of enjoyment. Boss fights seem tedious, as you just have to outlast wanzers with a ton of health. Seems like a decent title, but nothing memorable.
