Being put in the shoes of the therefore outgunned party is a great scenario to start with, as it does put a lot of focus on smart tactical operations. Within the lore of this world, the clans, having left the world a long time ago, have developed superior technology in the meantime before returning to re-conquer. It has the typical scenario of the “Inner Sphere” battling the “Clan”. The game gathers a lot of the original's appeal. And then, with all the expertise of FASA itself and the marketing power of Microsoft behind, came Mech Commander. Ironically, the best attempts at converting this tactical experience up until this point had been inofficial rip-offs: an obscure (and a little bit clunky) Amiga shareware game called MechForce and more recently Dynamix' MissionForce: CyberStorm. Plus, the influence and role-playing-like development of the pilots lead to additional compelling complexity. Equipping those battle machines by hand, pondering whether to take a heavy auto-cannon to apply one deadly shot (if getting close enough) or instead some mid-ranged, dependable lasers. The idea of the hulking, giant robots, heavily armored, but also equally heavily armed to take each other apart appealed to me. In my late teenage years, I played the original tabletop a little bit. What it came with, on the other hand, is the official BattleTech licence. After the filmed intro, only a short, tiny video snippet was shown as partial briefing every couple of missions. On the presentation side, it was the antithesis to the over-produced Command & Conquer series.

Notwithstanding, between few military units only, when Blizzard's latest outing, StarCraft, was just celebrated for the “Zerg rush” (an early mass assault strategy). Doing away with the simplistic Sim City like base building and mission-internal technology and unit upgrading (which, honestly speaking, never made much sense anyway), it focussed on tactial battles only.

Mech Commander, along with Commandos, brought in a bit of a fresh breeze. By 1998, the genre had already driven itself into a dead end. All the other companies wanted a slice and imitated the same formula very closely. Though the huge success of the genre beacons (in the real-time strategy genre: the duopoly of Command & Conquer and Warcraft) came at a price. Both genres were inherently computer-based, due to controller restrictions on console systems, leading to quite some passionate pride on the part of PC proponents who overall found themselves in a defensive position in this era. Views: 652 Screenshots Review by Mr Creosote ()īy the mid-1990s, PC gaming had been almost exclusively taken over by 3D shooters and so-called real-time strategy. Theme: Based on Other Media / Multiplayer / Science Fiction / War

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