When it comes to thinking about future technology, nothing is as common, fanciful or blatantly frivolous as battle mechs… but that doesn’t stop us from continually making new games and stories built around them. Front Mission 4 is the newest chapter in the best selling “Front Mission” series, making its debut on the PlayStation 2.
In this episode you find yourself in control of 2 separate characters, Elsa a new recruit in E.C.’s Durandal corps, and Darril a U.C.S. Army sergeant stationed in South Africa. Elsa starts her missions off in Germany. She was sent there to investigate several attacks on the E.C. German base. All this is happening about 4 years after the Second Human Conflict in the year 2096. In Darril’s missions you and your squad are sent to Venezuela after it’s governor declares independence from the U.C.S.
As you may or may not know, this game is a turn-based, tile-based strategy fighting game based on mechs called Wanzers. With these hulking beasts come all the accoutrements that you have been accustomed to when battling in large impractical robots. You have at your disposal an array of weapons and items that you have to equip your wanzers with before battle sequences, as well as levels for your skills and pilots. With so much to look after, there is quite a bit of management to be done before each new scenario, but with this lies the first problem with Front Mission 4. You’re slightly briefed before each mission, but I say brief with a grain of salt. It may be just an intro video, or cut scene. This lack of intelligence turns the configuration of your wanzers into a complete crap shoot. Seeing that you can configure your team in a variety of ways, and each individual wanzer can be specialized in such a varied amount of setups you’d hope that your force would have some good intelligence to go on, but alas they don’t.
Aside from the lack of knowing what it is you’re going to be up against, some gamers may be daunted by the onslaught of menus that lay before them in the configuration process. It’s not so much that there are too many (okay, maybe there are), it’s that you find yourself constantly flipping back and forth between several of them before you can successfully unleash your walking tank on to the world. Minor quip, but there are many other games out there with better designed menu systems.
In a game set in the future consisting of huge battling robots shooting lots of guns and missiles, one would expect some great graphics to go along with the tapestry your imagination has woven. Front Mission 4 is a mixed bag in that department though. When the game starts your greeted with some of the most action packed, well produced mech footage ever seen. With “wanzers” flying across the countryside blasting, killing, and just plain "destructifying" everything that lays in front of them, you’re raring to go when the game starts. Instead of the beautifully rendered wanzers, huge earthshaking explosions and lush landscape, what you’re greeted with is a bit different.
The wanzers themselves look pretty decent, showing off the different weapons that you choose to equip them with. The problem is with the environments you battle in. The tile-sets for the battlegrounds are painfully boring and plain. The city fights are also equally "sparse feeling" in their appearance. And to top it off, the explosions are just NOT big enough! We’re supposed to be fighting with the pinnacle of war machines here and all I can seem to shoot with is a machine gun that creates a few sparks? Yes, the weapons do get larger as you progress through the game, but each one seems to lack that huge ball of fire you were expecting.
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The sound effects on the other hand are executed quite well. Bullets whizzing by your targets and the sound of metal crunching together was music to my ears. The wanzers do sound a bit light in the loafers though, with not quite enough “boom” in their steps. The soundtrack for the game is more like forgettable background music though. You don’t really find yourself getting into the music at many points, as you’re usually pretty caught up in the battle.
When not in the battle sequences you actually get to hear voices this time around in the Front Mission universe. The majority of the characters are voice acted (and quite well for the most part) during the down time between missions. This does bring me to one of my largest frustrations with this game though; if you’re going to do voice acting… do it all the way. About 30% of the dialogue is voice acted but the rest of the time you’re left reading the “old fashioned” way. What makes it even worse than your normal run of the mill videogame-novel is the fact that when in the bases or different locales you don’t actually ever see your characters. You only see a small anime-esque portraits next to the dialogue to indicate whose speaking. This is all well and good for most of the time, but in certain cases you’re being introduced to new characters and it just gets plain confusing.
Now with all these bad points I’m talking about you may have gotten the wrong idea. Front Mission 4 does have its faults, but it’s not really a bad game. The execution of the battle sequences (the meat and potatoes of this game) are pulled off quite well. The terrain comes into play for different tactical approaches. You can hide behind buildings, jump on top of them and climb hills. In addition to that, fans of the series will welcome the new “link system” which allows you to pair up with teammates to create some über attacks.
Overall, if you’re a fan of past Front Mission games, or turn based strategy games in general, you’ll probably get a kick out of this one. Casual gamers, and fans of other “real-time” mech based games beware though: Front Mission 4 will probably be either too technical, too boring, or just not your cup of tea.
