Mobile Forces

I went back to Mobile Forces expecting a dusty curiosity and got something more complicated than that. Built on the first-gen Unreal Engine by Rage Software, this is a 2002 team-based FPS where the hook is simple: you can jump into a Dune Buggy, a Humvee-alike, a troop truck, or an APC, and use those vehicles as weapons, transports, or mobile firing platforms across eleven large, open maps. That vehicle-plus-infantry loop was genuinely ahead of its time when it launched, predating the Battlefield formula that would later eat the genre whole. On paper the mode list is solid. Eight options total, including Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Captains (kill the opposing team leader to score), Capture the Flag, Holdout, Detonation, Safecracker, and Trailer. Each map is compatible with every mode, and the maps are sized to reward vehicle movement, with wide roads crossing between team bases that make driving feel purposeful rather than cosmetic. The vehicle physics deserve credit: shoot out the tires and handling degrades, hit the fuel tank and it explodes. That kind of feedback loop was not standard issue in 2002. Here is where I have to be straight with you though. The weapon side of the game is weak. The assault rifle does most of the work and the rest of the arsenal barely competes. There is no class system, just an inventory loadout you swap at base ammo crates, which keeps things simple but also means matches can devolve fast into whoever grabs the first vehicle crushing everyone else. The bot AI in the single-player Missions and Skirmish modes is predictably bad, and solo play functions mainly as a slow map-unlock progression rather than a real campaign. Offline, this game has almost nothing to offer. The character animations are jerky even by early-2000s standards, and the weapon sound design was called out as a weak point even in original reviews. The online and LAN picture is thornier in 2024. Rage's original master server died years ago, and while the community at MobileForces.org set up a replacement server that you can point the game toward by editing a config file, the active player count is thin. Steam's small review base skews nostalgic and positive, but if you are buying this expecting a populated multiplayer lobby on a Tuesday night, you will be disappointed. The Remote Play Together feature on Steam is probably your best path to getting the LAN-party experience without physical hardware. Round up four to eight people and the game genuinely opens up, because the maps need bodies to fill them. Who is this actually for? Retro FPS collectors, LAN party organisers who want something unusual on the rotation, and anyone who wants to show a friend what vehicular combat looked like before Battlefield refined it into a genre staple. Go in expecting a rough-edged time capsule and it delivers. Go in expecting a functioning competitive shooter with a live playerbase and you will be uninstalling within the hour. Fred, Scout Team