"Out of rifle ammunition again..."

I've always enjoyed the Front Mission series, even though giant, mechanized quasi-human things have generally been something that I step slowly away from. After getting hooked on Front Mission 3, and then playing the original, I was eagerly awaiting Front Mission 4. It was the first game in a long time that I went out of my way to acquire a demo for, and it's the only one I've ever kept. Although Front Mission 4 changes up some things I would have liked to see stay the same, it was still a very enjoyable experience.

Front Mission 4 is a turn-based strategy game, you know the ones people like to refer to as “Tactics” nowadays. It involves you controlling a squad of mechanized robots, known as Wanzers, and using them to completely demolish everything in your path. Each of your pilots can move so far every turn, and has a specific amount of action points to spend. Moving a single square takes up one action point, two on certain terrain, and attacking takes between one and twelve. As you progress through the game you'll be able to increase the amount of action points your characters have, as well as a lot of other statistics.

Of course, how far you move depends on your Wanzer. A Wanzer is broken up into four main parts: The body, the left arm, the right arm and the legs. Each set of legs has different movement stats, as well as differing stats in other categories. The arms have different accuracy adjustments, and the bodies have different power. Each piece also has its own individual HP value and weight. A body can only hold a specific amount of weight, and you'll find yourself tweaking things to try and fit that new part you want to take into battle.

In addition to the Wanzer parts, you'll also be given a wide range of weapons to choose from. Each weapon is also quite different. Melee weapons are medium damage weapons with an extremely low-AP cost that can only strike from a single space away, whereas shotguns cost more to use, but spread the damage around to all the parts and have a range of three spaces. There are also shoulder weapons, such as Missiles that have large ranges but can't target anything within five squares, and rockets which damage a large area at once. The stronger weapons like rockets will have low ammunition, getting only four shots in some instances, but others grant you much more ammunition.

When you run out of ammunition, that's it. Your Wanzer will just have to sit there or fall back on melee weapons. There are items you can use to refill ammunition, but I always elected to take repair items over them, so whoever was carrying my rifle was usually dead weight two thirds of the way through the stage. Poor Renges.

The newest features in this installment of the Front Mission series, something that can be seen as either a curse or a blessing, are backpacks. Sure, you had basic backpacks in Front Mission 3, but Front Mission 4 ups the ante. Backpacks can now be used as radars to extend missile range, to inflict status anomalies on opposing Wanzers, to repair damage you've received throughout the stage and a few other things. The repair backpack, however, is pretty much forced on you. Sure, you don't have to take it into battle with you, but when you're only halfway through the stage and all your Wanzers are already missing parts, you'll be begging to repair just one arm. But with new abilities comes reduced functionality. Whoever is hauling around the repair backpack is going to be armed very lightly, as the repair backpack adds a lot of weight onto your Wanzer.

Battles take place on a grid, with you and the opposition alternating turns. You move your characters, attack with them, end your turn, wait for the enemy to move some of its units, and repeat. Pretty simple. Where it gets complex is with the issue of links. Each character, between battles, can link up with other pilots. You can set up to three pilots as offensive links, and up to three pilots as defensive links, and you can allocate either one or two link points to each pilot. If a character is linked offensively, they will join in on the attack, even if they've already moved. If a character is linked defensively, they'll attack an enemy Wanzer if it decides to take on whoever they're linked to. Let's say you have Thammond linked with Luis offensively. Thammond has already moved and is sitting next to a Wanzer. Luis then proceeds to let loose a shotgun blast at said Wanzer. Thammond, because he is linked, will then attack the Wanzer again, as long as he has enough action points to do so. Using links, you can easily set up large chains of attacks to decimate even the strongest enemies in a short amount of time.

Another important part of the game is your BP. After each battle, characters are rewarded with BP. You can then go into Pilot Setup and buy your pilots a variety of different things. You can upgrade their weapon proficiencies, increase their speed and evasion, buy more link points, buy more AP and also purchase battle skills. Skills are also important to winning your battles. Certain skills will increase your accuracy when they activate, some lower enemy evasions. Some will allow you to attack twice that turn, some will allow you to escape without the enemy getting to attack. There are a lot to choose from. The most important part of battle skills, however, is not what they do as much as just activating them. If you've allocated two link points to a pilot, it will allow them to use skills when performing a linked attack. Every time a link is used consecutively in a single assault, the percentage of damage is increased, until the damage is doing twice what it normally would do. Linking together a bunch of cheap, somewhat useless skills can do wonders later on down the road.

Battles can take a long time. You can rush through them, but you'll probably end up missing parts at the end, which will cost you money. Later in the game I found myself spending over an hour on a lot of the battles. After every wave of Wanzers, I would make sure I was ready and position myself anew for whatever was coming next. I could probably have knocked five turns off of most of the battles by not forcing myself to take up a V-shaped defense constantly, as my fast Wanzers were forced to move only a partial distance so the slower Wanzers could keep up. However, this doesn't mean that the battles are particularly difficult. Most of the battles tend to come down to whether or not you're using your repair backpack efficiently. There are simulator battles you can participate in which can be found as you go through the game, to earn you extra money and experience, and I found some of these harder than most of the actual story battles.

The visuals are a step up from Front Mission 3, although in a lot of places it looks like a baby step. You can still customize your Wanzers colors, but what colors you can use is limited compared to Front Mission 3. Sure, this game has three or four times the amount of colors to choose from, but in an attempt to make the game seem as realistic as possible, bright colors and odd colors have been removed, and camouflage rules the day. Jaggies have been reduced quite a bit from the last installment, although it's not cutting edge for the Playstation 2. The skills don't have the flurry they used to have, and a lot of the parts, though different looking, will seem very similar in battle. Although the visuals strike me as a downgrade in most ways from Front Mission 3 in options and variety, they do mesh quite well. In the end, they come off looking quite good and fitting the setting of the game nicely.

The music in the game isn't top notch. To tell you the truth, outside of the music that plays often in between battles I can't even remember any tracks. They were just forgettable. The sound effects are the usual clangs and explosions, as well as the sound you would expect a thousand tons of steel to make grinding together.

The voice acting in the game is the old double edged sword. Some of the accents in the game sound like they come from a comedian stereotyping a typical person. If this game took place in Canada, you could expect a lot of “Eh” from the game. However, the actual dialogue is spoken quite well, regardless of run of the mill accents. There were only a few points in the entire game where a line felt out of place, all of them pertaining to Zead if I recall. A few words here and there were accentuated, when another word in the vicinity looked like it deserved it. Other than those few lines, the rest of the spoken dialogue is very good.

The game features standard strategy controls. It felt right the second I picked it up. A few times during the game I'd toggle the HP bars off, but I believe that's just because the previous game I played used triangle as the cancellation button. There's no confusing, hand switching controls to be found. No menu that appears halfway through the game because you forgot to hit select and start simultaneously. It's quite basic, but that's the way it should be.

There are two separate stories in the game. The first one places you as Elsa, a new recruit to the tactical research team, Durandal. Upon completing basic training of a new Wanzer, you get the news that a German base fell under attack, and you're to go help in unraveling who was responsible for the incident. As you progress through the game, you'll find out that there's more than meets the eye.

Over in the other half of the world you're placed as Darril, a military man in the Venezuela/Brazil area, who is quite apathetic about his job. While on patrol, they receive what sounds like a distress communication, and then witness a plane go down. However, the plane was carrying millions in gold, gold that belongs to the disliked Governor of Venezuela. Deciding that you're not going anywhere in the army, you decide to go AWOL and take off with the gold.

I'm currently on my second trip through the game. There isn't any plot points you can uncover, but I spent a lot of time on the missions the first time through, and I'd like to challenge myself by executing my strategies quicker. I also missed a few of the simulator stages that I'd like to try my hand at. Odds are, you'll only play through the game a single time. There is a New Game + feature that allows you to carry certain things over into a new game, but there's nothing new to find the second time through.

Overall, the game is nicely put together, and with the exception of the giant mechs, seems quite realistic for 100 or so years in the future. The story isn't contrived to high Hell, and the characters aren't walking episodes of Dr. Phil, but it doesn't lack depth. When everything is said and done, it's an above average title if you've played the series before, an average title most likely if you haven't.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 11/17/04