"A good game that lives up to what small army strategy games should be"

Front Mission 4 is a futuristic strategy game where you take control of 2 separate squads (one lead by Elsa and the other by Darrel) who have different stories that unfold as the game progresses and ultimately join up for a compelling story. All in all this game has everything a good strategy game should have: good story, amazing customization, good graphics, and a great battle engine. It did have a slight lacking in the AI, but I will explain more about that below.

Game play: 9
You take control of mechanical assault units, “Wanzers”, that are large machines that look a lot like transformers. Each wanzer is piloted by a specific person who has a great affect on how that wanzer performs. The long and the short of it is that you take a set number of wanzers (up to 7) into a set battle screen area and you attempt to wipe out the opposing forces. There are some neat secret bonuses associated with completing certain requirements during battle (like beating a map in less than 15 turns can land you a nice surprise). It plays out like a chess match in which you move all your forces and then your enemy moves theirs. The type of wanzer you use and what weapons are always up to you and it is by far one of thee most important keys to success.

Customization: 9
Simply massive. Each wanzer is broken up to 5 parts: legs, arms (x2), body, backpack. Each part serves a crucial factor in how you play the game. The body serves as the power house. It determines how much weight your wanzer can hold. From that you add legs and arms which each have advantages and disadvantages associated with them. For example, if you pick a body meant for a missile launcher type, it will be able to hold A LOT of weight. The toss up is that the missiles take up tones of weight so you can't equip him with guns and missiles. Also a missile supporting body will have 0% evasion against enemy attacks. Then of course you have the assault type that use close range weapons that take less weight but, of course, and assaulters body would not support much weight. It would of course have a much higher evasion rate. And then there are also snipers, medics (oh yea, I'm serious) and bazooka types, and they each have their own neat ways of being built. The real fun part comes in making your own mechanical beast. At the start of the game your options are fairly limited. But later into the game you have lots of ways to mix and match to make your own walking terror factory. And yes you can change the camouflage and coloring a whole lot too.

There is also a cool level up system in which your pilots gain experience from killing enemies (distributed equally to all members after every kill) and they can use those skill points to upgrade their affinity for weapon types (like say a machine gun) and do more damage with them. You can also increase their evasion rates, give them battle skills (like terror shot which lowers enemy evasion) and a whole plethora of other things. My one gripe is that each pilot you get is pre-catered to a role (like Elsa is geared towards being a close range assaulter) because of their default skills and the skills unlocked as they level up (like Elsa would gain the option to upgrade machine gun power where as someone else would get bazooka upgrades). This is countered by the option of buying computers for your pilots which allow them to “change” their class (for example, you can buy an assault computer for a missile type pilot and they would get machine gun and evasion upgrades). The flaw I found with this is that its to time consuming to get enough money to truly change the role of all your characters and get them the needed computers. You can get extra money (and experience) by running simulations that you unlock, but the downside is that you get less and else each time and it comes to a point where you can't upgrade your pilots past a certain level and truly make them masters of the class you want. Not a HUGE deal but still a little annoying.

Another added twist is the link system. This allows you link up pilots to coordinate attacks. It's a fairly complicated system (at first) but when you get the hang of it you can really master how to make the most out of each of your turns. This is another one of the major strategy elements. Don't forget though, the enemy has link skills too…

AI: 7
If you try to do all the special conditions to win bonuses after certain battles then you will find some those certain battles hard. In general however, I find the tactics of the AI were lacking, as they wait for you to come to certain areas and then make their move instead of coordinating well planned attacks with all their units. This can make it easy to pick off enemy units in small groups. Not super easy by any means, but most maps wont make you think to hard. There is a nice balance though and unless you REALLY know what to spend your skill points on, then you will find the enemy is usually on the same killing skill level as you (which I like). You should also note that no matter how much you try to level up, the wanzer parts that come available are ALWAYS similar to what your enemy has, so there's no way to save up and buy a super awesome wanzer early in the game.

Story: 9
A great story that gives you a reason to fight through the game. Technically its 2 stories, but they are linked to each other so it all plays together as one big one. You won't see how they are linked at first, but that's the beauty of a good double storyline like this.

Graphics: 8
Not bad, they will make you proud of whatever beast of a machine you have made but the zoom max in battle can leave you a little thirsty as you can only go so close. What I mean is that I found you couldn't zoom in enough in battle and so the models of each unit were a bit too small to really appreciate their design. Up close when you are customizing your machine (out of battle), and in the cut scenes too, are pretty good and have nice details.

Replay ability: 7
The game can take you about 50 hours to complete doing the bulk of the game. It is a fun game to play through a game once you know all the twists in the plot although you will probably want a month or so off (to play other great strategy games like final fantasy tactics). I myself am playing through it my 2nd time after having beaten it a while ago. Once you start mastering the AI tricks though, you may find this game a little too easy.

Rent or buy: This is not a real strategy RPG, it focuses more on the strategy part so if your looking for a srpg, I say rent it first. If you love strategy games then you will love this one so I say buy it!

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/15/05