Front Mission Evolved is an attempt to bring forth an old classic into a new era. With that, you would think there would be a lot of new things to be thrown at you. Storyline, character development, and a new way of actually playing the game since the main series is completely turn based. Sadly though, what you get is something that seems to be just another splinter of a successful intellectual property looking to bring in a few bucks. Double Helix Games did do a good job though of bringing the player into a third person view, allowing them to see lots, and we do mean lots, of explosions.

This may seem a little harsh, but it really is true. The storyline takes place in the future where the world is essentially a collective of groups with their own interests in mind. Technology has advanced at a rate that makes the Moore’s Law look like small potatoes. War breaks out some group gets all antsy and blows up someone else's orbital elevator getting everyone’s boxers in a bunch. You will play as engineer Dylan Ramasey, working on an upgraded mech, or “wanzer”, when all of this takes place. As fate would have it, your father is in an area of destruction and you head over there to try and save him.  Sadly though, things don’t go as planned and you end up in them military.  

For the majority of the game, you will be piloting your wanzer with projectile and melee weapons in your battery of pain delivery. Depending on what upgrades you feel you apply to our wanzer, you can actually move about quite well making the poor realization that today's robots have a long way to go. One thing I thought was odd though is that as a pilot of a huge chunk of steel, you would think having a simple seat belt on or available would be shown during the cut scenes from inside. Sadly though, I think if you were to take a massive front attack to your wanzers face, where you happen to sit mind you, your body wouldn’t survive.  You have the ability to update your wanzer, one of the major features of the Front Mission series, giving you some major customization abilities. These will include weapons that can be use on both hands and shoulders giving you some dual wield action on your enemies.  Ranging from shoulder mounted missiles to machine guns to high powered sniper rifles, you will be the bringer of death. Besides having the ability to use different types of weapons, you can also upgrade mobility parts on your wanzer as well. 

Depending on the mission at hand, you will want to use different types of leg styles according to the terrain. For instance, if you will be doing a lot of hail-mary shots at your enemies, you will want to go for the full four legged implementation or if you will be doing a lot of climbing around buildings, incorporating hover thrusters is something you are going to want. I think, Double Helix wanted to add some break in game flow by giving your missions where you would need to jump out of your wanzer and get to the action on foot. You know, to break it up a bit. Unfortunately, your small human frame won’t be able to handle a rifle that shoots bullets the size of your body, so you will be stuck doing guerrilla warfare with machine guns and grenades. 

Here now, is where things get a bit boring. Whether you are in your wanzer or circa 2170 Nike’s, you will just be blowing things up. You will need to move from point A to point B and do it efficiently as possible. The problem here isn’t that you are doing the same thing as every other game, it just doesn’t feel like it was well executed.  If almost has the feeling that during the games initial design meetings, the development team stated they need X amount of time. The upper management replied stating it was a lovely request, however you need to shave off 1/3 of the request and you better get going because your development cycle started last month. Even though you have really good audio of everything being demolished, it doesn’t help you a whole lot as you move through what sometimes looks like basic building sprites and hurried level development. Which brings us to the boss battles. The enemy wanzers you will encounter and huge, over powered, and run around with a iron factories worth of armor on them. All the while being as nimble as a woods fairy.  This however, isn’t as bad as it sounds because when we played the game, local power-ups kept regenerating, thus giving you the ability to shoot, move, take a hit from a few dozen missiles, find a power-up and repeat. This process will take a very long time making it get a little old over time, but you do end up getting through them.

Front Mission Evolved also has a multi-player option available as well. Giving you the basic death match, team death match and domination game types, you will kill others, gain experience points, and proceed with upgrading your mech online. It seems these days that every game has to have a multi-player option, and while this has nothing to do with Front Mission Evolved, some games can do without them. 

In the end, Front Mission Evolved really didn’t do it for me. It was the same thing over and over again without any real innovation or change of pace. While there were a lot of pretty explosions and a fair amount of customization options available for use on your wanzer, you really didn’t get that feeling of a pay off after working for so long. It would almost seem, that a disservice was done to the Front Mission series and that, as stated before, this game was rushed out the door for a few bucks in hopes that it would be liked.

2 out of 5 widows