Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance – A fallen series

[Dracos]

Mechwarrior is one of the mainstay classics of sci-fi gaming.  It's been around in a bunch of forms since the early days of computer gaming and long before then in both books and a variety of table-top strategy games.  It had its competitors, the battletech series comes to mind, but it filled a very solid niche like nothing else quite managed: That of giant semirealistic mecha combat in a futuristic military universe setting.  

Now, I hadn't touched this series in many years when I played this.  The last I saw was the mechwarrior 2 series which had a rather sizable following and with good reason.  It was covering the clan wars, an inherently exciting part of history in which two intergalactic nations were coming into conflict.  They had a lot of various plays based around fighting for the glory of clan, country, and individual.  It was neat stuff that framed the mech combat pretty well in the overall scope of an all out war.

A while back I got a whim to replay it again, but found, to my sadness, that it was a pain in the neck to get working on XP.  So, I sort of gave up on the whim until a friend handed me the entire MW4 collection.  Good friend, or so I thought.  I installed it and, after a bit of a fight, got it not to demand I keep my cd drive occupied with their stupid cd during use.

Starting it up, I found we were not playing anything remotely as dramatic this time about.  Instead, during a coup, a planet was made an example of and the entire royal family killed.  You, the sole remaining descendent of the planet duke are left to get revenge and free the planet from military occupation.  You've got your uncle, a few of your father's old allies, and some mechs.  This time, the battle is held all on one planet of the inner sphere (well the planet and its moon) and you are fighting off the occupation forces.  This, despite what one may think, involves a fair number of one on one grudge matches with various military officers and, of course, your estranged cousin, the puppet ruler, who reminds  you every time he appears that he has always beaten you in everything.  Overall, a far less dramatic backsetting, but one with a lot of room for doing neat stuff with.

The thing is, they don't do that.  They're not doing anything really interesting.  The enemies consist of exceedingly arrogant punks, the standard fat and stupid military dictator, a retarded cousin that always flaunts that he's better than you but you never react to until you kill him in your one meeting with him, the undercommander that knows how to lead but naturally gets handicapped so that you're able to win since no one else knows anything about strategy.  For taking over a planet, you end up facing a rather tiny amount of critical points, generally spending everything but the final city facing tiny amounts of resistance.  Worse, despite this being heavily inner sphere, you run into no shortage of clan mechs and weaponry.  This is inclusive of ones that are supposed to be rare prototypes by the story.  Despite being told the madcat mk2 was something special and rare even among the clans, they promptly stomped out with a half dozen or so of them later on, sometimes coming all at once.  The characters, on top of being poor from a plot coherency perspective, are generally terrible actors.  It never feels real.  There's too much peace and love in the whole shtick.  This is the era of battlemechs.  The concept of popular uprisings doing much against such things is supposed to be one of the things lost in this.  When something can swat down buildings, it isn't the type of thing you see direct revolution against outside of having heavy artillery (which they may have but...why would civilians have that type of equipment?).  You've got this silly public radio constantly broadcasting stuff against it and beyond that, the radio and communication channels are constantly staticky in a way that you'd expect five years before today, not two thousand years in the future.  In general, the whole plot falls apart and, if the expansion is telling the truth, your main character, the caring charismatic leader of men, promptly kills his sister and goes insane after the game, despite letting her rule.  This made the whole story even more unpalatable.

From a gameplay perspective I do not see significant changes from how it was in MW2.  Things are smoother, run nicer, and are better colored, but other than that, it's the same type of game.  It just well, lacks any soul to it.  The enemies are far too often tiny vehicles rather than mechs.  They're also almost never done with symbols or any kind of noticeable paint job.  The weak level schemes clearly paint this as something solely meant for online play, which I did not go ahead and do.

In general?  I'd recommend staying away from this game unless you're going for the online stuff.  It's like playing a bad B movie.  Everyone knows the heroes are going to win because the enemy is entirely too incompetent to wipe their own asses.  There's no drama to it and the acting is terrible.

[Jason_Miao]

I bought this game when it first came out.


IIRC, MS developed this game when the gaming division was still fairly new.  Part of the agreement to develop was that they got to design their own mechs.  That's why there are some weird-as-hell mechs in there that you never saw before.

You're right concerning the game was not good.  They sold MW4 on it's multiplayer strengths.  The 1 player mode was included because all the previous ones had 1 player modes.


I still wish someone would do a remake of MW1.  Some of the most fun that could be had on a 286. ^_^