FRONT MISSION 2: Remake

I won't waste people's time with a wall of text: give this game a hard pass. Unlike in the first game, the player seems to be constantly outnumbered and outgunned. The numbers heavily favour the AI enemies on ALL accounts: the hit chances, the unit count and the raw unit stats. Your Wanzers pack a lot fewer items, shields are not nearly as reliable as in Front Mission 1 and artillery is practically useless. Sure, it was almost too convenient in Front Mission 1, but now that firing it costs a MASSIVE amount of AP, it favours the AI, who is mostly sitting around in wait while the player has to advance, which leaves them not enough AP to use missiles. The game is simply being cheap in terms of difficulty. Stick to Front Mission 1 and hope that 3 will turn out better.

First I am going to point the good aspects, the combat of the wanzers looks brutal and well made for the time, the atmosphere is dark and gritty, the soundtrack is pretty faithfull and the RNG has been improved compared to the first Front Mission. Now, the bad part. Actions points (AP) are shared with movement, that is, if you move you use AP and you will not have enough AP to use long attacks, but if you counter you also use AP, meaning, you have to choose what to do because you don't have enough AP to do anything. Your weapons have a limited amount of ammo and the enemy ALWAYS outnumbers you, so you run out of ammo in the middle of the stages and can't fight anymore. To upgrade your wanzers you have to buy and equip different parts, and each part has a weight, so in order to customize your wanzer you have to balance weight and power or you will be overweight and won't be able to use your wanzer, but every item in this game also has weight so good luck trying to make a heavy wanzer build and carry items with you, and yes, extra ammo are items and they carry extra weight too. The UI is awful, specially the store where you buy parts to upgrade your wanzer, it's really hard to compare stats of each part for each wanzer. Finally, is not optimized for PC, example, the mouse sensitivity is way high, you have to set it to around 3 percent speed to move normally, some options like in the map to select the mission has to be done with the keyboard only, and several small grievances. Also, Square Enix just licensed the IP, they didn't develop nor publish this bad remake. There are plenty of better strategy games for a lower price, don't buy this game.

An achievement seemed to be bugged. Looked into it, Steam version got a patch (various bug fixes in addition to the aforementioned issue) but nada on GOG. Also, pretty sure the decade+ old fan translation has less typos than this.

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