Gamestock 2001: Hands-onMechCommander 2

Announced at last year's Gamestock, MechCommander 2 has made a number of public appearances since it was first unveiled exactly one year ago. However, we were looking forward to the chance to sit down with the game and gauge exactly how far it's come along since the last time we saw it at the 2000 E3.

The game is nearly complete, and as such, we were able to play through a number of consecutive single-player missions. One of the first levels put you in control of an Atlas and two Catapults, and you're instructed to take out a convoy of enemy trucks, and then destroy an enemy weapons facility. While these two objects seem simple enough, executing them properly is rather challenging. However, had this mission taken place in the original MechCommander, we would have undoubtedly had to replay it several times before successfully completing it. Thankfully, Microsoft and FASA have made the challenges in MechCommander 2 a lot more intuitive, so you won't have to rely on trial and error in order to go from mission to mission. The biggest such improvement is in the game's enhanced resource menu. In any given mission in MechCommander 2, you're allotted a certain number of resource points that you can use to call in various types of support. This support includes airstrikes, fixed artillery, sensor probes, repair trucks, scout copters, minelayers, and salvage crafts. Each of these reinforcements cost a certain amount of resource points.

The most useful of these reinforcements are the repair truck and the salvage craft. The latter of the two can be called in after destroying an enemy mech. A VTOL aircraft hovers above the downed robot, partly repairs it, and inserts one of your own pilots into its cockpit. That mech now becomes under your control, and you can use it against enemy targets the same you'd use your own mech. When you call in the repair truck, the same VTOL carrier drops off a slow moving vehicle that will follow your pack of mechs and fix any damage that any one of your mechanized warriors have received. The truck, like your mechs, has a health bar that decreases every time it sustains enemy fire. But this health bar also decreases when you use the truck to repair your mechs. When the truck's health bar reaches zero, it no longer becomes operational.

Normally, you'll only be given enough resource points to order one or two of these reinforcements per mission, but if you take over strategic enemy buildings, you'll be awarded with additional resource points in mid-mission. Additionally, at the end of each mission, you're awarded a certain amount of C-bills, the standard currency of the Battletech universe, with which you can use to salvage any enemy mechs that you encountered (and destroyed) during that level.

MechCommander 2 is coming along very nicely, and the FASA team is in the critical crunch mode of its development cycle. The company hopes to have this game on North American store shelves this July.