Review by:Tony Mitera

It has been some time since the last Front Mission release, and even longer yet if you stick only to international releases. While Front Mission Evolved bears the name and some of the hallmarks of the classic franchise, the change to real-time gameplay over its turn-based roots hasn’t been kind. On one hand you finally see Wanzers zip around in real time with all the speed and firepower usually reserved for cutscenes in the previous games of the series. On the other hand it lacks any of the real strategy, tactical combat, or depth that up until now had been series mainstays.

You play as Dylan Ramsey, a Wanzer tech working for a private company based out of New York and the son of a respected Wanzer scientist. A sudden terrorist attack against New York cuts a swath of destruction through it, leaving Dr. Ramsey missing and his son Dylan to fire up their company’s prototype Wanzer in revenge. Along the way Dylan finds many friends and foes, as well as the typical shadow organizations and governmental double-crosses found in many games of the series.

The change to real-time combat is certainly a large departure for the series, letting you directly control all aspects of your Wanzer as you cut through a swath of various enemy unit types. Wanzer control is easy and precise, allowing you to skate in and out of cover as you line up shots with your various weapons systems or swoop in for some melee hits. Up to four arm and shoulder weapons can all be fired independently, with arm weapons running the gamut of machine guns and rifles while shoulder weapons are usually heavier artillery like missile launchers and gatling guns.

However, if you are using anything different than a sniper rifle and a missile launcher you are kind of foolhardy. While a bevy of selectable weapons exist they are almost all either outright pointless or pale in comparison to those two weapons. With missile launchers allowing you to fire a series of homing shots causing massive damage and a rifle that can kill most enemies in one or two shots, it makes the game both easy and incredibly boring. You can certainly mix things up yourself and use the other weapons, but on the flip side they all feel woefully underpowered to the point that you simply will take a lot more damage as a result of having to skate around out of cover for longer to get the job done.

The game gives you plenty of opportunities to customize your Wanzer as the game progresses, allowing you to swap out weapons as well as torso, arm, leg, and backpack parts. It all becomes a balance of how much power the torso puts out to haul it all around versus how much weight your Wanzer clocks in at, as well as factors affected such as mobility, armor, and accuracy. Backpacks fill a variety of roles such as increasing your power output, letting you skate around in all directions, or letting you repair yourself without relying on armor pickups. You can also customize your Wanzers look to some extent and select a camouflage style and color scheme to suit yourself.

Wanzer parts take a beating but do get blown off from time to time, but to far less tactical effect than you would expect if you have followed the series to this point. Blowing apart legs still hinders mobility for both yourself and the enemy and critical torso damage blows up the whole Wanzer. Arm damage is supposed to hinder accuracy but it just isn’t the case for either yourself or the enemy. The problem with the system as a whole is that for all the time it takes to aim for specific parts you can just hit the larger torso and blow the whole Wanzer apart. With bosses immune to location specific damage it makes the whole system completely ignorable.