Hawken: Really like this game. It’s sort of in development limbo last I checked. 6 months, no patches, and the devs are apparently “gagged” for some legal reason. Sadness.
Mechwarrior Online: Would you like to buy some $50 DLC? How about now? Now? Hey, new map. Want a hero mech? $250 and you can have a gold Madcat. But the game is actually quite fun. I enjoy playing it, but I’m like 2+ years in now and it’s still not progressing to different battle types, or organized teams. This game BEGS to be an eSport, and it makes me crazy that it’s not at least servicing that.
Have you seen anything about Brigador? It is the next mech type game I’m looking forward to. I loved the Armored Core series… even though I was horrible at it. I always wished they would have come to the PC because I’m just not good with the gamepad.
It’s kind of weird that we call Mechs robots. They’re usually single-crewman AFVs, with no machine intelligence at all. Often enough they’re only vaguely humanoid, or maybe not even humanoid at all, with 4 or more legs or no arms.
I really enjoyed Front Mission 4, even if the basic premise and of course the dialog was kind of stupid. The peculiar thing is that it didn’t really feel like a Mech game. Since these were man-shaped giant suits carrying scaled-up infantry weapons, it ended up being more of a small-scale infantry game like XCom. There were a few weird rules like linked attacks, but the Japanese have introduced simlar arbitrary gamey mechanics to human-scale tactical games like Disgae or Resonance of Fate.
Front Mission 4 remains one of my favorite PS2 games to this day. I think that it fell during a lull in squad-based tactics games helped overcome the story and dialog.
FM4 really was a nice game. I liked the customization and development options. Also a beautiful opening credits animation sequence. But man, the cut scenes. I guess the devs didn’t realize they were making their characters look like they were from South Park with those funny mouth animations. Pity the PS3 Front Mission game was so godawful. It was indeed stompy mechs, but implemented really badly.
Well, I just discovered there’s a Front Mission 5. Apparently only released in Japan, but I found an english translated version of it that someone patched. Hrm…
Goddamn, there’s NOTHING going to stop me from playing that. Emulator, buy a modded ps2, whatever it takes.
Yeah, this thread is the first thing I’ve seen in a while that got me excited about upcoming releases. Thanks for all the suggestions.
I’ve heard of the front mission games, but I didn’t even realize they were tactical strategy (I always thought they were like Armored Core). That’d be right up my alley if it were released on PC. I still wonder why we haven’t seen another Mission Force Cyberstorm or MechCommander.