Front Mission Evolved

I want to like Front Mission Evolved more than the evidence allows. The core loop of piloting a Wanzer, swapping out torso, arms, legs, and shoulder attachments, tuning the mobility-versus-firepower trade-off, then taking that build into a firefight is legitimately satisfying for a few hours. Machine guns on both arms and a hover backpack for skating around the map, or a heavy-armored frame loaded with rocket launchers and anti-missile flares, the customization breadth is real even if the depth does not hold up to an Armored Core comparison. The E.D.G.E. system, a time-slowing overdrive that also doubles your damage output, adds a brief moment of decision-making to what is otherwise a straightforward blast-everything-that-moves structure. The campaign is where the goodwill evaporates fast. Levels run on rails, and the map design amounts to dull corridors dressed up as urban highways and frozen wastelands. Missions where the game yanks you out of your Wanzer for on-foot sections are a consistent low point: your human character cannot jump, the enemy variety is flat, and taking down a Wanzer with a rocket launcher while on foot feels completely deflating. The story involves engineer Dylan Ramsey accidentally becoming a war hero amid geopolitical tension between rival supernations, and it is forgettable almost by design. You can wrap the whole campaign in an evening or two, which is barely long enough to care. Gunship Mode, a rail-shooter interlude exclusive to the campaign, is a novelty that overstays its welcome. On the multiplayer side, the structure was ambitious for a 2010 mech game. Four game modes shipped: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Domination, and a King-of-the-Hill variant called Supremacy. A rank-progression system capped at 70 gated better Wanzer parts behind playtime, similar to the Call of Duty unlock loop of the era. There was even a prestige-equivalent called Tour of Duty. The problem now in 2025 is that the lobby is a ghost town. Maximum player count was eight, capped at four-versus-four in team modes, and that ceiling already felt like a constraint when the game launched. Today you are realistically looking at singleplayer only. If you were hoping to find competitive mech combat with a living community, this is not the place. As a PC port it is functional but bare. Graphical options are sparse, anisotropic filtering and shader quality being about the extent of it. A controller is genuinely the better input choice here; mouse and keyboard work but the game was clearly designed around a gamepad. Performance on modern hardware should be a non-issue given the game's age. Steam reviews sit at 62 percent positive across 723 ratings, which tracks: people who went in expecting a dumb mech shooter got roughly what they came for, people who expected a worthy successor to the tactical Front Mission lineage did not. Bottom line: if you find this in a bundle or a deep sale and you want a breezy, slightly dumb third-person mech shooter to clear in a weekend, the Wanzer combat alone delivers enough to justify the time. Just go in knowing the multiplayer is functionally dead, the campaign is short and repetitive, and the on-foot sections are bad enough to make you mash the skip button. Anyone chasing the strategic depth of the classic Front Mission games will find nothing here.

Fred · Scout Team

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