|
The Front Mission strategy series has been around for ages but has struggled to find an audience outside Japan. It has its cult following, but it's not one of Square Enix's most recognizable franchises beyond its homeland. This new entry in the mech series ditches the strategy in favor of third-person shooting. It's set in the year 2171 when war is fought with Wanzer mechs, 50 years after the events of Front Mission 5: Scars of the War. The human race has started a massive push for space exploration through orbital elevators. However, tension rises when one of the elevators being built in USN North America is destroyed by unknown forces. Engineer Dylan Ramsey finds himself involved in a new war brewing between the OCU and the USN. Players control an ordinary Wanzer mechanic who gets in trouble with the law and ends up having to enlist in the military, finding himself piloting the units he used to fix. The campaign is single-player, but there's also four-on-four multiplayer mode. Running around and blowing the crap out of things in your mech is great fun, but there are on-foot sections where you jump out of the machine and run around unshielded. Players will have a lot of freedom to customize and fine tune their mechs a la Armored Core. Purchasing new parts and building the perfect machine will be a big part of the game. You can carry up to four weapons at once, jump and dash. When your bullet time meter is full you can slow down time and deal massive damage to the enemy. On foot you lose the ability to jump and instead can merely roll out of harm's way. |
