Interface

Looks familiar

MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries follows the pattern set by MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries. It takes the core game and modifies it for a mercenary campaign. Elements are unchanged unless necessary. The most obvious change that was necessary for Mercenaries is an updated interface. The interface is now capable of giving players the option of choosing from a few missions visible on the star map, as well as hiring pilots and buying equipment.

Outside view

Mad Cat Mark II - a thing of beauty

Zing bada-bada

With MechWarrior 4, we were very pleased with the simplicity of the interface. It worked remarkably well and was very intuitive. The Mercenaries interface generally follows the same attributes though it has suffered from the passage of time and the necessary updates for a Mercenaries game haven’t been pulled off as smoothly as they should have.

The obvious problems

There were several moments were I found myself feeling irritation with the front-end interface, though only two were notable. The first is rather simple, perhaps even a seat-to-keyboard interface issue. Starting a new campaign is not intuitive. If you already have a campaign in progress, you’d have to go to the Rosters menu to create a new company, rather than clicking the ‘campaign’ button. Unintuitive bits like this pop up here and there with more consistency than we care for.

The larger problem, one for which we found no simple solution, was in the buying and selling interface. Mechs all come in various models, though every ‘Mech can be individually customized to suit your needs. The problem comes when the player tries to sell one of these mechanical monstrosities, but has more than one ‘Mech of the model he’s trying to sell. The ‘Mechs are all identified with a number and a name, so players can expect to see a Mauler-17 and a Mauler-43. Given that the player will have Mauler-17 before he salvages Mauler-43, it’s logical to assume that the perfectly customized one will be 17. Unfortunately, the game interface decides to sell the lower-number one first. There is no way to specify which individual ‘Mech to sell. Players are forced to drag and drop the model into the sell menu. Now, this would be a moot point if ‘Mechs didn’t have a weekly upkeep cost, or if they weren’t the actual primary income the player has from a mission.

He's down and out

Demolishers are tough, for tanks

I hope someone's keeping score

The rest of the interface works splendidly and does a magnificent job of satisfying any requirement a player might have. Weapons and chassis can be arranged by category to make purchasing and browsing easier, everything is drag-and-drop or selectable from drop-down menus. Yet here is where things start to feel a bit dated. The whole impression we had of the interface by the end of the game was not of a game interface, but of a fancy database or spreadsheet menu. Gamers want to feel immersed, not like they just got off filling out databases and spreadsheets at work, only to manipulate more of the same at home.

Control of the ‘Mechs is, as with MW4, brilliant. Even a basic joystick provides a satisfactory experience, though we do recommend one with rudder controls (for torso twisting). Mouse and keyboard work, but along with sports games this is one of the few genres on the PC that requires a real controller for the ultimate experience.