Unfortunately, the missions in the game usually have fairly straightforward objectives (kill everything that moves), but the environments they take place in keep things interesting. Snowy mountains, war-torn cities, vast docks littered with crates and warehouses, and even treacherous swamps and expansive fortresses are the kinds of places players can expect to do battle. Adding to the ambience a little more are dawn/day/evening/night cycles that occur if a mission plays out long enough to reach a certain turn, and there are even weather patterns, such as snow or rain that look very nice and realistic. Some of these environmental changes can actually affect weapon functionality however, and the game urges players to be aware of how their accuracy and range might be changed when a fierce snowstorm blows in. On the subject of difficulty, the game has a fairly acceptable challenge curve that helps ease players into the new types of enemies and equipment they’re bound to encounter in the future, but once enemy Wanzers start using artillery, things get significantly harder and more frustrating, especially when enemy forces most commonly outnumber your own team to a large degree. However, these later missions are far from impossible with the right tactics, equipment, and to a lesser extent, skills and pilot experience levels (which seem to actually mean a lot less than they did in FM3), and if a given mission gets too difficult, players can choose to spend as much time as they want playing simulated missions, which will actually give them money and experience from completion (as mentioned earlier). Nothing vast, but enough to give them a helping edge until they feel comfortable enough to move on. On top of that, the game actually includes an option to save the game in the middle of a mission, so if something goes wrong, players have a little safety net to prevent them from having to start all over again – a very wise choice, given how some of these missions can take an incredible amount of time and effort. A brief note on the AI; early on, it may seem that the enemy AI is somewhat stupid, sending out only one or two units at a time to attack you while the rest stay merrily in place, heading out only once the preceding wave has been destroyed. Initially this was annoying and made me think the game’s missions were going to be all about sitting back and letting the enemy come flying at my guns in singles and pairs, but this ultimately revealed itself to be a balancing choice to get players into the game easier, as the enemy forces rapidly wisen up further on in the campaign and try to attack and surround you all at once. Rest assured, the enemy AI definitely knows how to handle its troops and will do everything it can to stay out of reach of your melee units, block its artillery Wanzers so they can continue raining hot fiery death down on your squad, and ultimately kick your ass and force you to chuck your controller at the TV in frustration. It may not be perfect, but I never had any reason to sit back and consider the possibility that the programmers may have been ingesting some manner of crack. So don’t get too comfortable after playing the first few missions – things will change.

Spicing up what might make for an increasingly tedious turn-based strategy experience is a very swank graphics engine, offering a very fine degree of animation and detail. When moving Wanzers around, the game’s graphics engine offers a zoomed-out overview of the battlefield, with a camera that can be manipulated and zoomed to a nice degree. But when an attack order is given, the camera zooms right in on the action to show the combatants engaging in battle with a sick level of detail. Tracers track every bullet fired, showing clear hits and misses, with the impacts bouncing off the armor of a target with little flashes from some of the bigger machineguns where explosive ammo is being used. The weapons themselves are also greatly detailed and animated, with bullet casings being dumped out of the weapon by the boatload and the chamber sliding back with each salvo that flies out – again, this really only applies to the kick-ass machinegun weapons, but the other toys also have their own little details and quirks to watch for. As for the Wanzers themselves, fans of Front Mission 3 will probably be in awe at the level of animation presented in this newest title. For starters, Wanzers are no longer represented by quirky sprites when in the “battlefield overview” camera, but instead are full-detail models that replicate the exact facing, position, and status that you’d expect to see in the action shots when your Wanzers are busy shooting stuff up. The actual movement looks very realistic (well, as realistic as a near organic-moving giant robot could look, that is), with none of the old clipping problems or animation weirdness that plagued FM3’s antiquated engine. Wanzers will move their arms and torsos to bring their hand-held weapons to bear against a target before firing. Melee Wanzers will literally run up and bitch-slap their targets in different manners, depending on what kind of poking/stabbing implement they have equipped (sadly, the spike-like “Pilebunker” weapons still don’t physically impale themselves in a target and then cycle back out, like is shown in one of the game’s opening pre-rendered movies). When a Wanzer’s arm is blown off, you’re treated to a nice secondary explosion as the limb detaches, leaving only a shower of sparks and a bundle of wires where the joint was – alternatively, destroying a Wanzer’s legs results in the armored framework around the limbs being annihilated, leaving only the bare, exposed structures underneath, barely keeping the Wanzer upright. And of course, blowing the hell out of an enemy’s central body will destroy the Wanzer outright in a nice fireworks display, though this sadly annihilates all trace that the unit was ever on the battlefield – not even a scorch mark on the terrain tile remains. My only major complaints about the game’s graphics engine are that the framerates tended to drop a lot in a few missions (particularly those with lots of urban structures), which made the motion blur effects far more noticeable and almost seem out of place, and the fact that the Wanzer animations in some of the combat scenes can be a little cumbersome in linked battles – attacking an enemy from two sides at once will result in the target constantly turning around to try and face its attacker, only to slowly do it again when somebody else fires in an amusing, but ultimately annoying manner. Finally, the game’s lack of any major anti-aliasing become incredibly obvious on numerous occasions. Normally I’m not really one to complain about jaggies (despite having a Radeon 9600 Pro on an XP2500+ processor in my PC, I commonly run with my video card-based anti-aliasing filters totally disabled for better framerates), but Front Mission 4 became infested with staircases from hell far too often for even my liking. This is something of a minor complaint, but one that most hardcore gamers will be making at least once throughout the game. When do we get a PC conversion so I can make the game suck on some 6xFSAA loving, damnit?

Unlike its predecessors, Front Mission 4 now features a compliment of actual voice acting! Note how I refrain from indicating a “full” compliment, as only some of the game’s segments have actual voices, and these are either during certain cutscenes, or when one of the main characters gets his Wanzer taken down and is whining about not being able to fight anymore. Be that as it may, it was very refreshing to finally be able to put a voice behind the big names in the game, and the voice acting was actually decent. Some people might find a few of the lines more amusing than take them seriously (“Hey-a Arrow-a two, she-a got us-a pretty good-a back there, eh?”), but overall I found that the actors behind the characters fit their roles beautifully throughout the game and put on a believable performance – I particularly enjoyed hearing Wagner’s icy tone during every encounter. Of course, the game’s sound effects have not been skimped on, with machineguns (there I go mentioning them again…), shotguns, melee pokers, and every other implement of purification in the game augmented by some incredibly satisfying sound effects. I just absolutely loved taking a Wanzer out with a pair of high-end heavy-hitting machineguns and trying to set off one of the double-strike abilities so they’d both be fired off at the same time in a vicious manner, filling my ears with the beautiful, beautiful sound of bullets being explosively launched from a gun that had a muzzle most likely three to five times the size of my head. Finally, the game rounds off the action with some excellent, heart-pumping sound tracks, but my complaint here is that the tracks seemed a little short and too quick to loop, causing me to get tired of hearing them fairly quickly (recall my mention of how some missions can take an incredibly long time to complete). Overall though, definitely a great audio experience that will cause your neighbors to call the cops in haste because “that no-good drug-abusing teenager is shooting off guns in his basement again”.

Sadly, Front Mission 4 has no multiplayer support, which is a little disappointing, since with a proper “fog of war” implementation (all units on a map are normally visible at all times, regardless of friend or foe association) and a little tweaking, it could make for a cool little title to play for either hot seat, link cable, or even online. I’ve heard reports of testing going down for some crazy “Front Mission Online” title in Japan, but until I hear more I’ll simply be resigned to putting on a sour expression and praying that it finds its way over here for me to indulge in (especially after the ass-raping I received with the release of Steel Battalion: Line of Contact). That said, FM4 is an awesome, awesome game that any fans of mecha, turn-based strategy, or both will thoroughly enjoy. The game doesn’t quite have as much content as FM3 did (there are significantly less missions, but they take a lot longer, and the storyline is a lot more concrete), and there’s not even any sign of the vaunted “virtual internet” feature that made FM3 so innovative back in its time, but what FM4 does offer, it offers by blowing down the door, charging into the room wielding several hand grenades and screaming like a psychopath, and then detonating horribly, taking out everything in the immediate vicinity. What I’m trying to say is, Front Mission 4 kicks ass, and you really, really should buy it now.



Really.