Title: Front Mission Evolved
Players: 1 – 4 (online)
Genre: Third-Person Shooter
Platformers: Xbox 360, PS3, PC
Developer: Double Helix Games
Publisher: Square Enix
Release Date: Sept 16th, 2010
Since AAA publishers refuse to make games for real gamers and have resolved to filling their games with “modern” approach, many of us have had to resort to playing only games in our back catalog. One game that was well worth the journey into the seventh gen history books is Square Enix and Konami’s Front Mission Evolved, a third-person mech shooter for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC, featuring hot chicks and plenty of big robots to boot.
Double Helix was at the development helm of the game, but despite being an American company, Front Mission Evolved feels very Japanese. I wasn’t completely keen on one of my favorite turn-based strategy franchises being given the real-time combat overhaul, but it works well for Front Mission given that it still retains some of its heavy tonnage gimmicks from previous generations, but with a decent enough accompaniment of both mech-centered and on-foot action segments to bring the TBS-focused franchise into a newer generation.
Pros:
+All the chicks in the game are hot
+Wanzer combat feels heavy and impactful
+Wanzer customization is fun
+Lots of weapons and parts to unlock
+Decent enough story framework with fun levels
+Eight-hour campaign that doesn’t overstay its welcome
+Some replayability with collectibles, unlocking new parts
+Mission variety and plenty of tactical combat options
+Great hand-animated characterizations
+Challenging boss fights that require skill
+Main villain is an open-borders Commie
+Superb 60fps gameplay on PC
Cons:
-Online multiplayer is dead
-On-foot segments are tedious and stilted
-Game crashes frequently for the on-foot segments
-Level environments for wanzers look dated
-Bland UE3 lighting with generic shaders
Nothing Like The Originals
Originally I avoided Front Mission Evolved specifically because it wasn’t a turn-based strategy game. I originally thought it was a derivative approach to cash-in on the contagious blockbuster syndrome that so many other AAA publishers had been infected with throughout the seventh gen; oftentimes leading them to overblown budgets, atrociously pretentious plots, and Hollywood voice actors who weren’t worth the performances they delivered based on the amount they were paid for because of their names.
However, hindsight is a heck of a game changer, and being able to gain perspective on Front Mission Evolved compared to today’s degenerate-riddled society, filled with Left-wing propaganda, hideous lesbians POCkers, and effeminate poster boys for soy, I can’t help but relinquish any ill-will I may have held toward Square for turning a turn-based strategy game into a third-person shooter, only because it represents everything that’s no longer allowed in today’s industry.
The general gist of the story centers around Dylan Ramsey getting trapped in a geopolitical machination upstarted by a mysterious mercenary faction that attempts to destroy the world’s only space elevators. And yes, they are actual space elevators that take people from the ground and into space.
The plot is typical Japanese sci-fi fantasy, with all sorts of twists, turns, and revelations that take place over the course of the eight hour single-player campaign.
There’s a healthy cast of characters, especially on the enemy side, some of whom get more screen time than others, but each one is unique and has their own personality, which helps make the different factions easier to identify, as well as keeps the plot moving along without getting bogged down in the minutiae of the game’s own politically-themed warfare taking place in the 22nd century.
Not-So-Simple Story Delivered Simply
Unlike Metal Gear Solid you’re not beaten over the head with a bunch of info-dumps, but unlike previous Front Mission games set in a dystopia future following the whims, wishes, ups, and downs of various mech pilots (known as wanzer pilots), Front Mission Evolved takes a more straightforward approach to its subject matter. Players are only given control of Dylan Ramsey as he goes from being a headstrong engineer prototyping his father’s latest inventions for the wanzers, to a full-on soldier after a tragic event compels him to take the fight to his enemies.
There are a number of recurring foes throughout the game – with all of the female villains being super hot or sexy in their own quirky ways – and a tie-in between one of the central plot points and an actual in-game mechanic known as the E.D.G.E., system, which basically works as a slow-motion mechanic that allows you to quickly identify enemies and unleash a barrage of firepower against them while also being able to easily dodge any incoming attacks. I actually thought it was neat that they would tie the feature so heavily to the story and the character development, because oftentimes games have all sorts of crazy mechanics but they’re either ignored or unexplained in the actual game’s lore.
For instance, in Assassin’s Creed games you have all these crazy special abilities but in the in-game lore no one really acknowledges that that stuff exists or how it impacts the world around the Assassins/Templars. The only time they acknowledge any of the supernatural elements is when they attempt to track down the weapons from the inter-dimensional aliens. Here, they actually acknowledge just how powerful the E.D.G.E., system is and how it becomes a defining factor in combat.
In fact, the E.D.G.E., system becomes a centrifugal plot arc for several characters, including Dylan, his love interest, Adela, and a couple of the main antagonists.
It’s shocking, I know.
Wanzer Babes And Enemy Waifus
In fact, all the women in the game look hot. Complete waifu material.
The love interest angle also isn’t just there to be there, it plays an important part in the character struggles that unfold throughout the game and the main plot point involving the E.D.G.E., system.
Despite my reservations for wanting to play Front Mission Evolved, I do have to commend the narrative team for making so much of the game feel cohesive, which is a complete rarity in today’s industry where the narratives usually unfold in schizophrenic or totally nonsensical ways.
Mission Variety
The campaign also manages to keep the missions varied and original, where you’re sometimes trouncing through the city and clearing out enemy mechs or air drops, or you’re trekking through a facility on foot in one of the game’s weaker elements, which is the third-person corridor shooting. Even still, they manage to pepper in plenty of action, boss fights, and some strategic elements based on how you unlock upgrades and play Tetris with your wanzer’s parts while you’re in the hangar.
In between each main mission you can equip new parts that you unlock for your wanzer, or you can buy new parts with the money you earn for taking down foes. In fact, this is one of the few action games where the more enemies you kill the more money you make, and in turn, the more powerful you can make your wanzer.
For games like Earthsiege, Battletech or Mechwarrior, typically you earned upgrade points based on the salvage you retrieved during missions, but here you get paid for every mech you destroy, every enemy you kill, every drop ship you down, or even collecting money drops scattered throughout the stages.
Wanzer Customization
But Front Mission Evolved is filled with collectibles. There are emblems sprinkled throughout the levels for you to find, data cards you’ll need to collect while doing the on-foot segments, or sensors to destroy to earn some extra cash.
This gives you some incentive to go back and play through the game on a harder difficulty setting while also attempting to attain all the collectibles or unlock new weapons, parts, or upgrades you may have missed during your first playthrough.
It’s unlikely that you’ll unlock everything your first go around, and if you’re really keen on experimenting with different wanzer types, the ability to go back and mix and match parts is certainly incentivized with the way the game is structured.
Basically, you can’t just max out your mech/wanzer. Much like Battletech or Mechwarrior, you have capacity limits on how much weight you can carry. Higher powered torsos allow you to carry more weight, which you have to balance between armor and weapons. Each wanzer has a torso, two arms, and a set of legs, along with a backpack.
Each section has its own armor and weight rating. If you want more armor it will add to your total tonnage. If you want more mobility then you’ll have to dump the weight. If you have too much armor and too much weight, you may not have any room for your weapons.
You can outfit each arm with a gun, or you can focus on melee attacks. Alternatively you can mount rockets, grenade launchers, gatling guns, or guided missiles on the left and/or right shoulder. There’s a bevy of weapons to choose from, not including the additional weapons you can access from the various DLC packs that were released for the game. This ranges from shotguns and assault rifles, to burst rifles, light-machine guns, and sniper rifles.
Weapon Specialties
Backpacks can be used to carry extra ammo, output more power so you can equip larger or more powerful weapons, defensively to disrupt homing missiles or EMP grenades, to heal your wanzer or your teammates, or they can be used to add more agility so you can use the turbo glide to dodge left, right, forward or backward.
There’s a fine balancing act you have to go through in order to find a loadout that works best for your play-style.
If you want to focus on getting up close and melee’ing enemies to death, you can. On the flip-side, you can load up a sniper rifle and pick off enemies from afar while utilizing cover to your advantage.
If you prefer going in guns-a-blazing, you can also do that by putting an LMG in each hand and a gatling gun on each shoulder. And yes, you can literally fire all four weapons at once, but you will have to do some heat management as the weapons are prone to overheating since they don’t have to reload.
Controls And Handling
The controls are competently designed, with the left and right shoulder buttons controlling the left and right shoulder weapons on the wanzer, while the left and right trigger control the left and right hand weapons.
The accuracy on many of the wanzer weapons is a bit low (save for the sniper rifle) when taking on foes at a distance, so typically you have to rely on strafe-firing, or fall back to using the lock-on guided missiles to get the job done.
As mentioned, the wanzers aren’t like Gundams. They aren’t as fast or as mobile. However, they’re also not quite as slow and hulking as the mechs from Battletech or Warhammer. They have the thrusters to get around quickly for a short period of time, as well as the ability to hover or quickly dodge, but it consumes the energy meter rapidly. Basically you have to use your thrusting capabilities very wisely, especially during boss fights.
Damage Mechanics And Limb Targeting
Much like previous entries in Front Mission, you can still target the different body parts on the wanzers. In the old games you would typically attempt to blow out an enemy’s legs to prevent them from moving forward toward your units on the battle map, or if you knew that there were heavy grenadiers you would target their arms to prevent them from locking on or bombarding your troops with explosives from afar.
Those sort of tactics still somewhat work here, but to a lesser degree. Since you don’t have command of multiple units like in the older games, you have to rely on tactically taking down foes using your own wits. Sometimes you will be accompanied by AI teammates, but they’re more there for show than to work as an actual tactical advantage on the battlefield.
This is where precision aiming, using weapon combos, and making sure your wanzer is outfitted with the right kind of armor and ranged ballistics come into to play. Maybe if one section is too difficult for you, try using a shotgun and blasting off the legs of an enemy wanzer; or if the missile bombardments are too much, try sniping the arms of the heavy artillery units.
While I like that you can exercise some tactical strategies on the battlefield, I was disappointed that you can’t actually blow entire sections off the enemy wanzers. The most you can do is dismantle the armor plating, but you still have to destroy the main torso to down an enemy for good.
This means, unlike Mechwarrior or the previous Front Mission games where you could target a leg and blow it clean off the hinges, forcing the mech to the ground, the most the body-part damage does in Front Mission Evolved is greatly reduce weapon accuracy for the arms, or slow down the mechs walking speed and severely reduce the speed of their boosters.
Strategy Sacrificed For Arcade Combat
Even still, the wanzer combat feels fun and satisfying.
Using multiple salvos of rockets against an enemy wanzer and seeing them reduced to nothing but an explosive heap of scrap metal is quite the joy. In the same way that using a melee weapon to pulverize a foe into smithereens feels quite joyful and impactful.
I think that’s one thing that Double Helix really nailed with the wanzer combat: it feels hardy.
It’s too bad the rest of the visuals didn’t match the quality of the wanzer combat, because a lot of the environments look like late PS2-era assets. I know this was still an early iteration of the Unreal Engine 3, but the lighting is dull, the shaders are uninspired, many of the textures are flat, and the overall level designs for the wanzers feel like pieces from a Toho monster movie set.
Dated But Enjoyable Graphics
I can’t complain too much, since the gameplay more than makes up for the cardboard cutout-style visuals for the backdrops during the wanzer levels.
The on-foot segments feel a little more polished as far as the backgrounds are concerned. They have a more lived-in feel to them and are also more accurately scaled to the characters.
I also really like the character designs in the game. They may not have the highest polygon count or the best shaders, but they look appealing and the animation team did a fantastic job with bringing the characters to life with their facial expressions and reactions that really matched the inflection and intonation of the voice actors.
In fact, the animations for the characters reminded me a lot of Free Radical’s work on TimeSplitters: Future Perfect or Team Fortress 2.
Unfortunately, I can’t say that the on-foot combat is as spectacular as the wanzer combat.
While the characters look good, and the environments are quite detailed, the shooting is shoddy.
When you’re on-foot you have access to a Kriss Vector and a rocket launcher, or you can pick up a shotgun from a downed enemy. You can lob grenades with the shoulder button, melee by clicking in the right thumbstick, duck with ‘B'(or Circle), or roll-dodge out of the way using the ‘A’ button (or ‘X’).
Stilted On-Foot Segments
Even though it sounds like the game has all the basic mechanical trappings for some solid on-foot third-person shooter action, unfortunately it just doesn’t come together well due to the layout of the stages, and the fact that the enemy AI is rather atrocious.
The AI will either just stand in place and pepper you nonstop with fire until you kill them or they kill you, or they’ll run around aimlessly still peppering you with fire. They will sometimes get stuck or oftentimes just run-and-gun with all the mechanical finesse of an android stuck in an attack loop.
Most of the levels are corridor in nature, and you don’t have much room when it comes to tactical maneuvering. There’s also a lack of smoothness in the aiming for the analog sticks if you’re playing with a gamepad, making it difficult to pull off headshots. You can modify the sensitivity but it usually either makes the aiming too slow and stiff or too fast and jerky. During the on-foot segments it’s much easier using a keyboard and mouse, and it also reduces the chances of the game crashing.
Yes, on PC the game crashes often during the on-foot segments. Some gamers in the forums suspect that it’s to do with the gamepad settings, and it’s true that if you switch from gamepad to keyboard controls, it reduces the chances of the game crashing. However, even with the controls set to keyboard and mouse, it will still occasionally crash during the on-foot segments.
Thankfully, these moments are far and few between and short enough that they don’t completely ruin the gameplay experience.
Even still, once you get the hang of the shooting (or if you have a Steam controller and fine-tune the smoothing by reducing the friction) the on-foot parts can be somewhat tolerable, if not adequately fun.
Thankfully you also don’t have to fight any bosses while on-foot, otherwise that could have been tortuous.
Classic Boss Fights
The boss fights in the wanzers are fun, though. The game has this old-school Japanese approach to boss fights, so that you really have to pay attention to your loadout, to the enemy patterns, as well as properly managing your health and ammo. The fights usually require whittling down the enemy’s life in a battle of attrition.
Unlike the more sim-oriented mech games out there, or even past Front Mission titles, you can instantly repair your wanzer during combat with armor pick-ups scattered throughout the levels. Health and ammo packs also respawn during boss fights, making them much easier to get through than if you were stuck having to rely on your default loadout.
Additionally, the game is quite forgiving insofar that if you die you can head back to the hangar and change your loadout, and then start the mission from your latest checkpoint. So if you get stuck on a boss you can mix and match parts or experiment with different loadouts to see what works best for you.
Barren Online Multiplayer
Outside of the campaign mode there’s also an online multiplayer component, but don’t expect to see many people online playing Front Mission Evolved in [current year]. There are Discord groups that organize online battles so that players who are achievement hunters can gather up all of the achievements, but if you plan on joining a random online battle… you’re going to have tough luck finding a session.
Alternatively, if you have some buddies who own the game you can always setup a private match.
There are a handful of different game modes for multiplayer, including free-for-all deathmatch and team deathmatch, as well as domination. You can either use pre-built wanzer settings or customize your own with the parts you unlock by leveling up through online ranked game sessions.
Again, since the multiplayer for Front Mission Evolved is practically dead, don’t expect much from it.
Overall, I would say that this is a game worth checking out if you love real-time mech combat games. It’s not as wacky and over-the-top as Gundam or Super Robot Taisen, but it’s also nowhere near as serious or sim-oriented as Earthsiege or Mechwarrior. I would probably say it’s comparable somewhat to games like Krazy Ivan or Shogo: Mobile Infantry Division, just with all the playability and quality of life upgrades offered by seventh-gen tech.
The story isn’t groundbreaking by any stretch of the imagination, but it works well as a campy, Japanese-inspired sci-fi tale about giant mechanized robots and orbital space stations that rely on space elevators to stay operational. It’s less bombastic than other similar games of the times, such as Vanquish or Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, but it’s certainly not as grimdark as games like Gears of War or Warhammer 40K: Space Marine.
Satisfying wanzer combat and a healthy selection of parts and upgrades might keep some gamers coming back to experiment every once in a while, but the replay values aren’t quite as high as games like Lost Planet 2, which had a lot to unlock and multiple alternate routes to explore. However, it does offer more replayability than games like Vanquish or Bayonetta, and if you had some friends who also had a copy you might even be able to make a group and play online at some point.
But if you want a game with hot chicks and mean mechs, I would certainly recommend giving Front Misson Evolved a try. Just don’t expect the tactical strategy and simulation gameplay you’ve come to enjoy from the older Front Mission games.
Verdict:
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