Mechwarrior 3 Review (PC)

Originally written: 04/01/2006
Recently I went on a website to ask which MechWarrior game was the best. Expecting to hear something fanboyish like: MechWarrior 4 or Mercenaries, I was surprised to find that they were all unanimous toward MechWarrior 3. According to many, They would prefer a Mech simulator to an arcade-ish FPS Robocop any day. Not having any Idea what the hell they were talking about, or what the fuck Robocop had to do with anything, I decided to go to my local GameStop to pick up a copy. Unfortunately, by the time I was able to play it, it crashed.

To tell you the truth, I wasn't actually able to play the game very much. This game crashes like the Hindenburg under Windows XP. I reformat, and even install Windows 2000. This thing still crashes to earth harder than Lucifer with an eviction notice. So, I do some Googling to figure out just what the hell is wrong with this thing. Turns out, I'm not alone. It seems a lot of people are having the same trouble, even WITH the updates installed. Finally, I come to terms with the fact that this sucks, and that I can't seem to fix it.

GAMEPLAY: Anyway, in campaign mode, I could only get about as far as level 2, but what I did get out of it was that regardless of it's craptacular programming glitches, this is a pretty good game. It's about as cool as huge robots with guns is going to get, which goes without saying that it's pretty good.

Custom missions in this game are AWESOME, with the addition that they last longer than the campaign mode before they crash. The only thing better than piloting a giant robot that kicks ass, is kicking the Asses of other giant robots. The only problem I have with it is that the enemy A.I. is phenomenally stupid! Not to mention that “the apple don't fall far from the tree,” because your teammates are just as STUPID, with the tendency to accidentally shoot you to death!!

STORY: The story on the other hand is a different story. To think that after 2 previous installments they still couldn't seem to make the story interesting at all, and although it doesn't take away from the quality of the game play, it would have been a nice feature to hold the player's interest.

GRAPHICS: The graphics are good, and needless to say are a definite improvement from the previous versions. The only problem here is that in order to switch from 1 st person view to 3 rd person, requires you to QUIT THE MISSION!

CONTROLS: The only real problem I had with the game is its controls. They are hard, and by hard I mean like pushing a camel through the eye of a needle. Although it helps to use a dual analog game pad, or a joystick, it's still pretty annoying constantly letting go of the pad to do some keyboard sh**.

VERDICT: This game would have been a hall of allot more fun, had it not been so unstable, but hey; it was a short but sweet.

This game is fun, convincing, innovative, and one of the best in the series.
The buddy AI is stupid, game's storyline is far from intriguing, game crashes harder than a DUI on the 405 freeway.