Front Mission Evolved

My very first "Armored core" like game, Its a pretty solid game and i really enjoy it when i was a kid and now i bought the game just to feel the nostalgia

10/10

It's a painful 7th gen console game and you can feel it throughout the entire game.

The gameplay has you battling against a number of different types of mechs or wanzers as they're called in the game, where you can destroy parts of their armor to reduce the effectiveness of the limb
for example, destroying the legs, makes the wanzer unable to move effectively, or shooting the arms will make the guns less accurate.
Which also counts for you, so you have a goal of trying not getting a limb damaged too much.

It sounds like an interesting mechanic at first, but you kill the enemies faster than you can deal damage to their limbs, so it's worthless.
And good luck if the enemy manages to destroy your legs, as you'll be shit out of luck trying to manuever your heap of metal.

Throughout the game you will have the option to customize your wanzer to you playstyle, with a large variety in the limbs, weapons and attachment.
Which sometimes will be limited by the mission, so you have to adhere to whatever the game requires you to have for a mission.
Most of the weapons and limbs feel at first glance interesting, limbs will have slight different stats, but will increase throughout the game.
But most of the weapons are inaccurate as fuck and deal little to no damage later on in the missions, so you just pick the weapon that deals the most damage.
At least the designs look neat.

Most of the combat is you moving through the arenas, encountering some enemies, killing them and moving on.
But at times you'll be on foot and the gameplay changes to the most generic 3rd person shooter that i've played.
It's hardly anything worthwhile, the only interesting part is when a wanzer shows up and you get the scale of how big they are and how deadly they are to regular infantry.

Controls feels outdated and wonky, but not to the extent that it's unplayable, you'll fight with the "skiing" controls though.

Good luck finding any matches in multiplayer.
Horde mode is a DLC and is designed for 4 player coop, so it's worthless.

It crashes a bunch of times and has bugs requiring a restart of the mission

Graphically it looks immensly dated and it's not for visuals you'd be playing this game.

The Story is so cliché filled you could roll your eyes to orbit and back again from how bad it is.
characters are extremely obnoxious and a lot of times don't act human in their actions or how they talk
villains boil down to smug pilots competing with eachother on who can suck their own dick from how much they love themselves, and for some reason never dies in any boss fight.
only to do a cartooney "ill get you next time" shit.
Not to mention you can't skip cutscenes.

Music is forgetable and is that type of generic action game music that just fades with the background and you dont even notice it's playing

Unless you're a fan of front mission in the first place, or really love mech games, i wouldn't recommend this one.
Even then, i'd recommend literally any other mech game than this.

👌 🔟/🔟

This is honestly one of the worst mech games I have ever played, and it's not because it is an action game called frontmission. It's just not fun to play at all, a total slog. Wanzers are basically gen 5 armored cores, maybe a little weaker and they are definitely slower. That doesn't mean they all have a walk speed your grandma could outpace. It's also wild how the tutorial talks about limb damage like it will ever be used, when playing this game your best strat is to burst down every mech that comes at your especially at the end of the game where it just spams 14 heavy assault mechs that are all built the same, it sucks. Mech build variety feels very rail roaded and because of that there is almost no player expression through builds. The game will even stop you in your tracks to force you to use some of the worst leg parts imaginable. There are a total of 3 encounters in the game that you will get to play over and over again. medium\heavy assault salad, heavy assault jambore with annoying engineer mech that will heal it's allows and run and hide, and lastly and least of all, quad leg missile mech double feature. It's fun at first but quickly sours into being crazy tedious. And compared to it's contemporaries the likes of Armored Core 4/ForAnswer and Armored Core V/Verdict day, heck even chrome hounds, this game does not even come close to holding a candle. All they had to do is play mechwarrior/MechAssault/BattleTech/ArmoredCore/GunGryphon to get an idea on how mech combat should be handled. Hell Steel Battalion shows us that slow considered movement and gunplay with giant machines can be really fun!

TLDR this game is bad. I would not recommend this game unless you are getting it for free and then only as a curiosity, its a bad mech game, its a shovelware shooter with awful anime writing where characters will stand around and watch in horror as their squadmate is shot down while they have every chance to do something about it. Just save your money for Armored Core VI or Gearbits or if you still have a ps2/xbox 360 play the mech games there. This one needed a lot more time in the oven.

Not really for me, I just kept comparing it to armored core which is a terrible comparison point when that franchise has been doing everything here much better for much longer. So I pretty much inadvertently killed the game for myself even if everything here is still serviceable.

Solid fun mech combat game, relatively challenging at higher difficulties and a nice story

I was really hesitant to pick this game up for a long time because of its reception and score. But now, after completing it, i am really curious why? Is it because of the genre change? Yes, it's definitely not Armored Core, but it's still a solid B-tier game. There is some varied gameplay to enjoy in various locations. There’s no junk, there are almost no bugs (except for the one mission that seems to crash randomly), and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Also, as in any Front Mission game, the wanzer designs are just peak (except for the cockpits 🤮🤮)

The story is nothing to write home about, but cutscenes can be quite fun to watch. Mostly because of the gorgeous wanzer grinding animations. And there are also surprisingly good facial animations in human characters for its time. It's actually quite refreshing to see some human action going on for a change (looking at you, Armored Core). Speaking of humans, there are also on-foot sections in some parts of the game. They are nothing special, nothing you haven't played in any other third-person shooter of its time. It would be so much more engaging if there was an ability to disembark at any point in every mission. But that's just me yearning for a more Titanfall/Lost Planet - like experience in games.

Considering there are not that many AC-like games on Steam, you can give it a go. If you are a mecha fan (especially the ones that grind on the ground), you'll get some fun out of it, but don't expect anything more than that.

YES

This is a childhood game for me and I still enjoy it now. I'd love to be able to do more than play the story or do the dlc mission on my own, so If anyone still plays and want to do more with the multiplayer I'd love to get together to play

Delightfully meh. Smooth frame rate. The multi-bosses were more difficult than they had any right to be. use a trainer or mods. I played in 2024 so, I have no idea if the multiplayer servers still work.

The game doesn't recognize any controls. Neither my keyboard or mouse moved the mech at the start and plugging in my controller forced the camera into the ceiling and had me rotating forever even once disconnected.
There are also no window options so whatever screen it decided to open on is where it'll be stuck fullscreening.

I'll check the community page to see if any mods solve this, but for now any help would be greatly appreciated.

Crashes far too often during the "infantry" segments

It's a shitshow of a game overall. Auto-aim tracks behind the enemies, the camera angles are abysmal on some of the layers & it has just God-awful storytelling.

Runs great until you reach the mission War Hero (the first on foot mission) which is so early in the game. The game hard crashes at random times throughout the mission forcing you to restart the whole thing every time. There are about 15+ "Fixes" the internet has to offer, from the simply stupid suggestion of turning it off and on to the outrageously absurd suggestion of completely buying a new "old" computer just to get through this one mission. This game is completely broken, don't buy it. Unless you want to bank on being one of the lucky ones to actually complete War Hero, or you just like bashing your head against a brick wall and wasting money. Crying shame, because I actually loved this game on XB360.

I remember spending quite a bit of time playing this back on PS3; I had mixed feelings about it then, and I have mixed feelings about it now.

The core mechanics are good enough on their own--customizing your Wanzer, getting out and shooting things until there ain't nothing left to shoot--but the experience is held back by several factors, such as unlikable characters and an honestly kinda dull story, and then of course there's the mandatory turret sections (and on-foot sections) which aren't *too* bad on their own but are certainly points of contention for people who just want some good stompy bot action.
My biggest gripe has always been the campaign's tendency to force you to use specific loadouts at certain points in the game (I get having to give players a taste of everything so they'll be "ready for the multiplayer", but c'mon, let me use quad legs for more than a single chapter), but man oh man the characters are a close second, especially the antagonists... and more especially during boss fights, which are often slow and drawn-out and feature endless one-liners from "threatening" adversaries.

Overall, it's not super-terrible. If you can give it a pass for being as old as it is and see it for what it is instead of what it isn't, it's honestly not the worst game you can buy, especially given it goes for about $10 Canadian at time of writing, but there's a lot of asterisks on my positive recommendation; I'd give it a "meh" if Steam had more than two options.