One of the first games we played at this year’s TGS was Front Mission Evolved. Despite being readily available in the shops in Japan, the game graced at least three separate booths across both formats (that in itself was pretty damn crazy to be honest). As such saying that the game we played was a “demo” and that there’s room for improvement doesn’t really hold true here, the code shown at TGS was utterly final in the released sense of the word. So what follows is pretty much an overture for our review most probably, in short we weren’t that impressed.

The section of the game we played was the invasion of New York in what appears to be a starting wanzer config. Controls are your standard third person shooter fare but boosting comes in two forms; a quick dash or a prolonged boost. The latter is a toggle and pretty much allows the wanzer to move in any direction without any really worry for momentum or mass. Added to this is a jump that does require management of momentum, just to be awkward really. Weapons were a missile pod, that was quite potent, and machine gun not to mention a melee attack weapon.

On paper all this should be fine but the execution is really quite unwieldy and annoying. Having the twitch based ground boosting and then having to change your approach to that for the jumping is just plain odd, as you’re trying to wrangle two physics systems – not one. The weapons, especially the machine gun, do still feel like you’re firing blanks half the time as most of the enemy wanzers seem to shrug the gunfire off or absorb it like an enthusiastic sponge.

To explain on the boosting, having Sam – a guy in power armor – in Vanquish slide all over the level at great speed and with pin-point precision is pretty crazy outside of gaming but it makes more sense than a very large piece of machinery doing the same thing, yet Double Helix are treating their mecha like people. Which would be fine if they’d stuck to that approach but they didn’t. As such, the handling of the mecha is inconsistent within the rule set it’s already established, as jumping tries to convey the weight of the wanzer, which from a gaming standpoint is the purest of crazy.

It’s not even got any kind of nuance to the ground boosting either, at least when Yuke’s approached the AT’s in VOTOMS they at least tried to give a sense of momentum as you “banked” into a corner. There’s absolutely none of that here.

Graphically it’s very mixed too, some parts of the game look great and the models of the wanzers are nicely done but their texturing is pretty woeful for the most part (this includes the environments too). The level design is artificially boxed in as well and it doesn’t feel like your fighting a gritty street battle at any point, which is obviously what they were aiming for.

Overall, this was unfortunately what we were expecting the game to be – a mecha game that’s embarrassed of the fact it is one. It’s the gaming equivalent of your Dad trying to dance at a party, you just want to look away and pretend it’s not happening. This is not a damning indictment of Western mecha games either, as High Moon already proved it could be done well in this day and age, but that Front Mission Evolved was just really quite disappointing.