Elvis Starburst said:
The Madman said:
Hmm... so age isn't a big deal and you like mech games eh? Ever tried the Mechwarrior series?
Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries is widely considered one of the best games in the franchise and is available online for free completely legitimately. Visuals are obviously pretty dated now given the game was released in 2002, but otherwise it still holds up exceptionally well today with solid gameplay, a great singleplayer campaign, and badass music. Not like there's much competition in the 'giant mech sim' genre after all.
I watched some gameplay. Everything from the music, graphics, and sound are so of its time it's amazing XD But that looks awesome, can't believe it's free at this point. I'll absolutely download it, thanks for the suggestion!
Pretty good game - it uses a bunch of controls, though so getting used to it is a bit of a challenge. It feels a bit like playing a piano but it's quite good when you get the hang of it. Just to clarify, the control scheme isn't bad - I think it's actually quite neat. It's just that it has a lot of buttons, e.g, you can rotate your mech's body without making an actual turn when walking, you can also increase/decrease the speed of it and you can also choose which weapons to fire. The last one is important as firing too often may lead to an overheat, so you could have a configuration where you start with a blast from all your weapons for a big damage opening, then move on to only fire some of them or maybe you just use different weapons for different situations and you don't need all at once.
The whole mech equipment and management is like a mini-game of its own - you generally have different classes of mechs based on weight - the heavier it is, the more guns it can equip, but they are also generally slower. Light mechs might not pack a big punch but you might be able to run circles around your opponents. So, it's a bit of a balancing act on where you want your mechs to fall under. Furthermore, different mechs have slots for different weapons - some have more rocket slots, so you could make them into a walking artillery that shoots rarely but powerfully, or you could choose a mech with lots of laser slots to just continually beam the ever loving shit out of your opponents. Most will have a mixture, of course, but it doesn't end there - you can slot in extra armour in exchange for firepower and some mechs have slots for other additions like jet packs. Not only that, but you need pilots for your mechs - you control one, but you need other people for your squad and they get specialisations in stuff like "light mechs" or "lasers" and so on.
If you're interested, you can also try
MechCommander 2 - it's an RTS set in the same universe and I'm pretty sure it also went free. It still has the same types of weapons and mechs, as well as pilots but it's controlled differently. It's also pretty fun.
Anyway, I'd recommend give
Cthulhu Saves the World a look. You can get it in a bundle with
Breath of Death VII [http://store.steampowered.com/sub/8848/] and it's literally two games for the price of one. Also, the games are very cheap. Both made by the same developer and both are not very graphically demanding. OK, that would be an understatement, but yeah. I really loved CStW but BoD is also decent. They are both pretty humorous and CStW in particular is dripping with it. It further has several alternative play modes which make for a different experience, like Cthulhu's Angels - normally you play with a range of characters, one of them being the titular squid face, but in this mode you play through the story with only the four female characters. It's much better than you might imagine, though - the premise is that Cthulhu is just too lazy to go and save the world himself, so he's sending somebody else instead, the characters are changed mechanically so they better fit into a party without the rest of the cast, but not only that - the
story is changed to accommodate that. It's not like the gameplay is different but the cutscenes are still the same.
