Review

I've been meaning to play Heavy Gear 2 for a long time. Well, since 1999, to be precise. Having had some fun with Mechwarrior 2, I was glad to see the mini-explosion of mech games in 1999, consisting of Starsiege, Mechwarrior 3, and Heavy Gear 2. Initially, my plan was to wait for the dust to settle, and then to sink my teeth into whichever game had clearly brought the best package to the table. It turns out that things weren't quite that simple. Heavy Gear 2 wasn't really vying for the same trophy as the others. Much like Thief, Heavy Gear 2 decided to change the rules of the game, in its case the Giant Robot Game. First of all, the robots wouldn't be so giant, and second, the combat would (supposedly) be more tactical and less of a bare-knuckled brawl. As I saw the HG2 reviews trickle in, I was intrigued, and took to heart the suggestion by some that there was good reason to play both HG2 and Mechwarrior 3 (Starsiege was widely regarded as too flawed to compete), as they offered different gameplay.

So, I resolved to give both games a fair shake, and thus here we are, a mere 4.5 years later, and I've finally gotten around to playing Heavy Gear 2. To cut right to the chase, HG2 fails. Its premise is sound, and worth pursuing, and I think that the Heavy Gear universe can and should (and hopefully someday will) be faithfully represented on the PC. Unfortunately, HG2 doesn't succeed, primarily due to technological obstacles.

Good

• The overhead tactical map is very nice, and much appreciated, particularly the ability to continue navigating your gear while viewing the map.

• The graphics are indeed a generational leap beyond the original Heavy Gear (built using the inadequate Mechwarrior 2 engine), but it is a mixed affair. The gears themselves are gorgeous and extremely-well articulated, but all other objects are painfully wanting for more polygons. The weapon effects are nice, with the exception of the laser weapons, which aren't very convincing. The skies are gorgeous, though completely static. Some cloud dynamics would have helped tremendously.

• Squadmate AI is decent. They'll obey orders, mitigated by their own personalities, and fend for themselves sufficiently.

• The interface is powerful (with the notable exception of alternate weapon firing as described below). It's a bloated interface, and I didn't feel comfortable with it until I'd employed my full CH rig, consisting of the FighterStick, Pro Throttle and Pro Pedals. However, once I'd finally configured things to my liking, I felt fairly adept manipulating the gear.

Bad

• The stealth gameplay feels totally hokey. See this screenshot for an example of a "stealthy" situation. There I am, lying out in the open bare ground, with several squadmates, barely 100 meters from the enemy, but I'm supposedly "covert". Right. I'm sorry, but the game engine just isn't up to the task. This is at the core of HG2's failure, I believe. I'm sure that stealth plays a huge part in the HG pen & paper game, and the developers excitedly latched onto the idea that their mech game could represent that, and could be the tactical, stealthy alternative to all those cumbersome, clumsy mech games of old. The problem is that their game engine, while certainly sexier than anything before it, still can't create anything much more than a barren, rolling desert. And there's nothing stealthy about standing in the desert in a big metal robot. A legitimate complaint leveled against the early mech games was that it made no sense to be running around in big, complex, bi-pedal mechs in environments that were little more than a giant billiard table. Anyone with their head screwed on straight would deploy vehicles of war much better suited to the terrain, such as tracked vehicles, or hovercrafts. Of course, mech aficionados countered that this was a failing of the PC game technology, not the mech universe, where in fact the terrain is much more complex and the utilitarian nature of bi-pedal robots indeed makes sense. So we have to pretend, I suppose, something that's required less and less of us these days as game technology advances. As counter examples, though, I offer up the Battlezone games and Hostile Waters as games that provide believable and immersive futuristic vehicular combat, and even a little stealth. For HG2, the problem is not so much that the terrain is still too flat (which it is) but that there also isn't nearly enough vegetation to make its vision of stealth even remotely plausible. I'm not suggesting that mech games should not be attempted until we can truly and adequately create environments sufficiently complex to require mechs. I'm only pointing out that the limitations of rendering performance continue to be a serious impediment to the enjoyment of these gameworlds. Consider the nascent stealth FPS genre, championed by the Thief games from the late Looking Glass Studios. I contend that Thief would have been an absolute failure had it been attempted without the capability of manipulating realtime lighting in the game engine. The gameplay, while easily envisioned, simply would not have been implementable in a truly entertaining way without that technological capability. Why, even without 3D audio, the game wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful. Does this mean that HG2 isn't fun, because the engine cannot adequately represent the environment necessary for the envisioned stealth mechanics? No. But for me, personally, it was a definite negative for the game.

• No mid-mission saves. Granted, the developers realized (somewhat) that this sucks, and the missions are reasonably short. Still, some involve repeated failure, and even if the mission is only 15 or 20 minutes long, having to start from scratch is enough to make me go play something else. An interesting downside to the short missions is that the ammo restrictions almost never come into play. Sure, you might run out of mortar or sniper rounds, but in general so long as you're not flailing around wildly, you'll almost never run completely dry.

• The interface contains several frustrating flaws that negatively impacted gameplay. The most frustrating issue was that there is no means to directly fire alternate weapons. You have to actively select whatever weapon you want to fire before you can fire it, and selecting it means cycling through your entire arsenal in sequence. This, despite the fact that weapons are clearly given specific mount points. Though you can carry multiple hand-operated weapons, you can only have one activated at a time, which is fine. What isn't fine is that you can only have one active weapon at all, whether that weapon is hand-operated or not. So if I'm carrying a rifle in my gear's hand, and have a shoulder-mounted rocket pack, I cannot directly fire the rocket pack. This is inexcusable and made me shake my head in disgust throughout the entire game. Note that you can directly throw a grenade. Where the hell is the sense in that when I can't directly use a non-handheld weapon? Not having played the Heavy Gear pen & paper game, I don't know if this restriction is a result of adherence to the RPG, or if the Activision developers were merely possessed by a demon.

• The sniper zoom only has one zoom setting, which is extremely frustrating, rendering it almost useless in many cases. This feels arbitrarily restrictive, not to mention the fact that it doesn't jive with the game world at all. Everyone is technologically advanced enough to build giant articulated robots, conduct hyper-space travel, colonize planets, etc.. but they can't make optics with multiple zoom levels? Call me picky if you want, but this was a pain.

• What's the point of the vibro weapons? Are we seriously expected to engage in "hand to hand" combat in big robots decked to the nines in advanced weaponry? Again, I've not played the HG p&p game, and I suspect that the melee weapons have some role in ritualistic duels, but I have a hard time swallowing the plausibility that they belong in general combat. For the PC game, they felt totally superfluous.

• The threat value system serves a decent purpose in multiplayer games, namely leveling the playing field in a game system with a very broad spectrum of combat capabilities. However, for the singleplayer game, it just felt like an arbitrarily imposed restriction that further denigrated the immersion.

• You can't change your gear chassis during the singleplayer campaign. Like some of the other things mentioned, in all likelihood this design decision can be traced back to the p&p game. That doesn't make it fun.

• The game crashes often. Note that there is no patch for HG2. Clearly, this is a game that Activision, in all their infinite wisdom and love for their customers, decided was in their best interest to abandon rather than maintain. I guess I should be grateful that the game runs well enough to even play.

Ugly

• The back clipping plane is so egregiously close as to be criminal. See this screenshot for evidence. Clearly, the clipping is as aggressive as it is because of the need to maintain framerates for the hardware of the time. However, I can set the game's resolution to 1600x1200, which would have been utterly unplayable in 1999. Why, then, can I not adjust visible range as a scalability setting as well? This omission is an absolute tragedy. The engine is indeed gorgeous, and I was ecstatic at the opportunity to run the game in 1600x1200 with 4x FSAA and 16x anisotropic filtering. But the effect was completely scuttled by the immovable clipping plane. Even where I playing on 1999 hardware, the clipping plane is so obnoxiously close as to ruin any sense of immersion.

• The singleplayer campaign is terribly underwhelming. The ending is a letdown, but that's not the real problem. The major failing is that the campaign completely under utilizes the gorgeous environments available in the game. Most of the game takes place on Caprice, which is a barren red planet with essentially no atmosphere. Jump over to multiplayer, however, or to the instant action, and you've got a smorgasbord of environments on hand. There are blue-skied coastal regions, arctic continents, swamps, canyons, green rolling hill country, dense single-story urban regions, etc.. Why aren't any of these showcased in the singleplayer game? I recall one level in a swamp, and one level in the snow. Aside from these and the token zero-G levels, the rest of the campaign is an exercise in monotony.

• No cooperative multiplayer. In a game like this, with a campaign featuring small squads, it's a crime to not offer co-op.

• No bots in multiplayer. I'll add HG2 to the long and prestigious list of games that I would still be playing if they let me play multiplayer with just a few friends. HG2 looks to offer really solid multiplayer, but it's not anything I can enjoy without a LAN full of people. This is particularly acute for older games, where I can't even find servers online anymore.

Beautiful

• There isn't anything about HG2 that really jumps out as superlative. If pressed, though, I'd say that the instant action feature is very good. All of the maps are available, as are all the gear chassis, and there's an excellent selection of both. It's a good thing, too, since the game offers no shooting range feature. If you want to experiment with different gear configs, instant action is really your only option.

Summary

Is HG2 fun? In a vacuum, yes. Ultimately, though, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was playing a first-person shooter with a cumbersome interface, and if that's all it amounts to, there are obviously better games to be had. I look to mech games to provide an experience outside that of the common shooter, and HG2 didn't deliver. Sure, the outdoor environments are nice, but Tribes was doing that in 1999, and significantly better. Co-op and bots in multiplayer could have salvaged HG2, but as it is, it amounts to little more than a footnote on the genre. Still, conceptually the Heavy Gear universe is intriguing and I would welcome future attempts to bring it to the PC.