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A good sequel for those who liked the first

Customer Rating:
MechCommander 2 is a lot like its predecessor, drawing on the rich BattleTech universe to make an RTS that brings the feel of the board game to the PC. Those of you who haven't played the first installment yet should go out and buy the original (I recommend MC Gold, which added some missions and fixed some bugs), not because it's necessary but it's better. For the rest of you, I'll put this review in terms of differences from MC Gold.

First off, the graphics are much better and are true 3D, not isometric. Whether you like this or not is simply your aesthetic taste, because it's never really necessary to rotate the camera. 'Mech customization is more realistic and costs money, which adds another layer of force management (but simple shoot-and-smash players will find annoying).

Speaking of shoot-and-smash, one of the great things about the original was that there was no "golden path": even though your mission log was linear, you could beat any given mission in a number of ways, leading to some decent replay value. MC2's missions seem to lose this, which is a huge loss because every now and then I still crack out MechCommander 1 almost a decade later.

MC2 does make three big improvements over the original. Salvage is now much more realistic. In MC1, you'd be lucky to get one in every 10 you shot. Now, you get about 8 or 9 out of every ten, but you have to pay to salvage them (don't worry, it's not mandatory to salvage everything). Rather than the fog-of-war-blackness in MC1's maps (which made no sense because you could see them in the mission briefing but not the mission itself), MC2 lets you see the entire map but utilizes line-of-sight to spot the enemy. Finally, rather than giving players a fixed number of fire support and counting support vehicles against the player's drop weight, all these are grouped under a new support tab. Since the new salvage system made the resource warehouses and container stacks of MC1 obsolete, the new incarnations of the above give players resource points, which they can use to call in several forms of air support. Mostly these correspond to what we saw in the original, with the minesweeper being replaced by the Karnov Salvage Craft, which allows in-mission salvage of 'Mechs. I found losing the minesweeper a curious choice because, unlike the MC1, there are missions where it would actually be useful here.

In summary, MC2 brought in a lot of cool new features (not all of which I listed here), but did so at the expense of mission depth. So, unfortunately, MC2 is not as good as MC1.

Not bad, but too easy

Customer Rating:
The original Mech Commander was very challenging and rewarding when missions were completed, and indeed exhilarating when the campaign was won. Then came Mech Commander Gold (MCG), with all of its newer features and commands for easier gameplay. MCG's new campaign didn't have the oomph that the first, original campaign did, mainly because the new controls made things a little too easy. Mech Commander 2 continues this trend, with an intuitive interface that somewhat oversimplifies the game into something that can be beaten in several days. I won this campaign in two days on the normal setting.

I liked this game because I am a Battletech fan. However, while it has both good and bad points (following below), it just lacked the challenge of the first one. After successfully winning that difficult game, I quickly dispatched this one into the past-game void.

Good Points

1) Lots of Battletech-y stuff to play with and blow up
2) Interesting storyline (albeit some over the top acting)
3) Good LOS rules
4) While the game is rather linear, as noted in other reviews, the idea of being a mercenary band is interesting

Bad Points

1) Easiest setting is too easy, hardest setting is too hard (taking two Bloodasp assault 'mechs against infantry and getting torn to pieces)
2) Campaign is too short, too easy for veteran Mech Commanders
3) Mission Editor is complicated to learn and use
4) All 'mechs (Clan and Inner Sphere) follow limited Omnimech rules, like most other offerings from FASA Interactive

Overall, I would give this a 3 1/2 star rating, depending on one's level of experience with the Mech Commander series.

Concept is there, but the game is lacking

Customer Rating:
Ok, first go read some of the bad reviews which talk about problems with getting the game to run. They are right. I have 2 computers, and for reasons that escape me one of them will not run this game. As a result you may want to borrow it from a friend and see if you can get it to work properly before you buy it.

The Good:

The battle system is very intuitive, and gives a nice ammount of control over your units. You can tell them to aim for different mech parts, concerve ammo, or engage at a specific range. You can almost pick the game right up and start playing it, though you may want to go through the training missions just to be sure you know about some of the finer points.

The mechs are also very well done, though I don't like the customization freedom with them (sure with the clan mechs it is ok since they are all omni, but last I checked most IS mechs were not). They do look a little blocky, however it does not end up detracting from the game.

The actors hired for this did a very good job. Cut sceens are convincing and you actually get to the point where you feel like you know them. The plot is fairly transparent, however it is more than enough to hold the game together and avoids the pitfall of making things too complicated.

The Bad:

The game is much too short, and much too easy. First time I played through I played on normal and it took me 3 days. Second time I decided to play on the hardest difficulty, and I am sad to say I didn't notice any difference. Very few of the missions are truely hard (most that are belong to House Leio, and even they are just what I feel the average difficulty should be). This means there is also very little replay value.

Adding to the little replay value is the fact that the plot is 100% liner. Nothing you do ever effects what you are going to do next or where you are going. Once you have played through once, you have seen it all. This also makes it feel like you arn't really a merc commander. You don't get to chose your jobs or to weigh risk and proffit at all. The game just strings you along, and no matter what your proformance in the mission if you complete it then you move on in the plot.

Mechs come out feeling a little flimsy with few exceptions. This is mostly due to the fact that later on the head is much too easy to hit. My standard tactic became pulling along a few mechs with long range weapons and just targeting the head of the mech. It would kill the mech with little to no dammage to the rest of the mech, making it ready to salvage and giving me that much larger of a force for that mission.

Another thing that this game would have benifited immensly from would be some type of campaign/mission editor to allow players to make thier own games. This simple addition would have pushed this game up to 4 stars overall raiting and a 5 star fun raiting since the problems with the campaign could be overlooked with the addition of player maps and campaigns that would cater to differetn interests.

If you consider yourself a fan of MW I would give this a try, but don't expect the world from it. The campaign is good enough that you won't be appaled by it, and the multiplayer is good (though nothing too terrably special as far as I could see) if you can find someone to play with. If you are just a fan of RTS games you should look someplace else as this will leave you with a wanting feeling.

Horrible Service

Customer Rating:
This game is absolutly horrible. I have a Radeon 9600 PRO and an Athlon XP 1700+ cpu, 512 RAM, and other good stuff too, and this piece of junk doesnt work. There are no game updates, no tech support from MICROSOFT!, and none of the solutions listed at microsoft tech support make it run. It installs fine, and starts to run the game and then just stops. New drivers were unable to fix it and who knows if I can return it. I give it one star becuase it looked fun and with my RADEON video card Im sure it would have looked sweet too!

Awesome Game

Customer Rating:
Mechcommander 2 is an awesome game. If you enjoyed mechcommander, you will like this one even more. You can add armor and heat sinks, and weapon choices are based on space(and heat). The only part I don't like is that not every mech can have jump jets. Another neat thing is that you sometimes need light mechs to complete missions. 5 medium and heavy mechs can complete a mission that 3 assault mechs can't. You have resource points for each mission and can capture more. These allow you to repair your mechs and gain control over defeated ones. If you like going around in big robots and destroying stuff, you will like this game.