Customization paradise and nice believable story...It's like playing a nice chess game.
Fictional Story placed in the real world, where battles and wars are fought with "Wanzers", giant robots manipulated by humas.
The game story may not be very deep but it's original and interesting.
The military tension between the U.C.S. (Unified Continental States, entire American continent) and the E.C. (European Community, whole Europe) is rising because a destructive attack on the main European resource base located in Poland, none knows exactly who did it but several countries are on the loop of the E.C. including the U.C.S, all this occurs on the same time as Venezuela declares its independence from the U.C.S.
During game you'll be playing with two squads alternately, one is an UCS squadron situated in Venezuela and the other is the Durandal, an European research organization with its main base located in the United Kingdom. WIth these two squad you'll have to uncover the truth behind the attacks on the EC.
---Graphics---
Front Mission's 4 graphics have aged very well, the wanzers are very detailed and greatly designed as so are the environments, Wanzer's models still look very good,the maps have a good amount of textures, including urban maps with a large quantity of buildings and weather effects, daytime and night also included.
---Gameplay---
The game is text based, it means you'll have to read a lot, the game characters speak through chat boxes like in any other RPG, of course at some moments there are nice cutscenes and good voice acting for you to enjoy.
Map scrolling is grid based and turn based, so you must take turns in order to attack/Move/use item/...
If you dont know how to do something, dont worry, tutorials are very detailed and clear for everyone to understand.
The number of parts to buy for your Wanzer is very very huge, theres A LOT of variety so you can create and customize your Wanzers anyway you like or how you feel at the time, Jetpacks, Bazookas, Arms, Legs everything you need to create mass destruction robots, added to this there's the "computer and pilot setups" where you can customize attributes to for the pilot and the wanzer such as resistances, aiming, special abilities,etc (a long etc...). But here comes what I think is the most negative aspect of the game,menu scrolling...there are tons of menus when customizing your wanzer, so many that it can get really tedious to do it, you'll have to constantly enter and exit through them to finally get your wanzer ready before going to battle.
While on battles, mobility, aiming and other stats will be affected depending on the weather of the map, if its rainy, then accurancy decreases, if it's snowy then mobility decreases too, and so on, this is a nice detail and puts even more tactical needs to battles.
There are several missions where the objective is not only to destroy all enemies but to protect an ally or a specific building, or even escape alive.
Just be ready to fight 50mins/60mins battles, especially the last ones.
---Resume---
The game is very tactical and has a great deal of customization for the genre fans, you can spend hours just buying things and tuning your Wanzers and pilots before going to battle, one of the bad things is that you dont have some kind of briefing before each mission, so you'll never know if you tuned up your wanzers correctly for the occasion just until you fight in the next battle and see if you obliterate the enemies or get owned by them.
The voice acting in this games is very curious, all characters (specially Europeans) have different accents so its very funny to hear their voices accordingly to their countries, this help very much to the sense of playing a game where the whole world is involved.
Tactical RPG fans and Front Mission fans will definitely like this title, new people could find it boring, but it is not boring at all, its a Tactical Game with HUGE possibilities, if it weren't for the tedious menu scrolling and infinite chat boxes this game could be rated 9.0 recommended for everyone,but appart from those little flaws Front Mission 4 is a great strategic game. do I recommend it? Sure I do.