Ever since the Mechwarrior franchise was taken over by Micro$oft, various aspects of recent titles have been lacking. The back story and soundtracks have suffered greatly over the course of what, three titles? Anyway, Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries, released in 2002, was the last installment in the series and as of 2007, there has been no word of future titles in the series. MechAssault and it's sequel don't count since they are arcade, action titles for the masses who are unlikely to get over the 1 hour learning curve of the Mechwarrior titles.
The back drop of Mech 4: Mercs is the Federated Commonwealth civil war between Davion and Steiner. At first the player, who is given the callsign Spectre, can take missions from either faction but doing so earns you positive infamy points with that faction and negative infamy points against the other. Ultimately, how your reputation fares with both factions will lead the player down one of three alternate endings.
The game play will be familiar to many fans of the series. As a merc commander, you earn C-Bills for successful missions, salvage mechs, buy, sell, and customize your mechs and their equipment to your liking and hire additional lance mates. A low point here is the relative ease at which you can salvage mechs, which was incredibly hard in Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries. In Mech 2: Mercs, you had to score a head or cockpit kill to stand a sufficient chance of mech salvage. If you blew the mech apart in normal fashion you were unlikely to get any salvage at all other than some remaining weapons. Additionally, salvaged mechs in Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries seem to have some instant free-of-charge repair ability as they appear fully repaired in your bay once salvaged. In Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries, you had to spend money repairing salvaged mechs. This all results in much to simplistic game play. After the first five missions, you'll be rolling in C-Bills.
The game is disappointingly short, with none of the depth or length or Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries. Any long time fan can finish Mech 4: Mercs in two days on Veteran difficulty, due to the somewhat weak AI. The only time the player will be in trouble is when the enemy mechs gang up on you. One-on-one, no one should have trouble.
If there are some things I truly dislike about Mech 4: Mercs, it's the voice acting of Spectre. That's right, the VA for the player's character is terrible. At times when he should be showing concern or worry regarding the status of fallen comrades, he sounds like a bored man reading his lines, lacking completely in any realism. In fact, the other VAs, especially Castle's VA seems quite good. I think attaching a voice and a picture to the player was a mistake since it forces you to form a mental picture of your character's... well..character.
The soundtrack is another disappointment. Whereas the soundtrack for the Mechwarrior 2 titles was superb and still held in high regard today, in Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries you get the same two or three tracks that play occasionally throughout the game and none of them can hold a nail to any of Jeehun Hwang's scores. By the way, he was the one behind the music in all Mechwarrior 2 titles.
All in all, if you've played all the previous titles, you can see the series going downhill slowly. Even the inclusion of Solaris 7 tournaments, which by the way was started in Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries, can't appease this disappointed fan. This title is only for true hardcore fans of the series and is a good example of what happens when big companies with only profit in mind, take over a popular genre from the company that previously made it popular, and then give it a slow death.
Come on Micro$oft, do something with the damn license or sell it.
