Sure these are old games, but what did you expect to see here.

I am going to take these two together since I played one after the other and because Computer Gaming World did reviews of these games in the same issue, although they gave the gold medal to Heavy Gear 2. I liked both games, but definitely feel mech 3 was better.

Mech 2 is still the best Mech game of the series (I have not played Mech 4 yet, but I heard it was different and not as good), but Mech 3 was great in its own right. It had good combat, the ability to repair during the mission (which is nice since you still cannot save in the mission), and good mission briefings which really conveyed a sense of story. Some of the missions were hard, but they were all doable. I only became stuck early on in a mission where you have to defeat an Annihilator. This mech is much better than anything you have at this point. After reading two different sets of hints, I was finally able to beat it and move on. The biggest drawback to Mech 3 is the weak squad commands, the worst being the inability to send one command to all squadmates st the same time. Unfortunately you have to go through each squadmate and tell him or her which target to attack, even if its the same target. This is the one area where HG2 has Mech 3 beat. Still, I found Mech 3 to be a great game even 10 years after it came out, but you’ll need Windows 98 to play it. I tried playing on XP, and the game plays, but you can never beat the first mission because at the end of the mission the game won’t let you destroy whatever you were supposed to.

Heavy Gear 2 is a fun game, but the last third of the game is mostly weak. As I said already the squad commands are great in HG2. You can also choose to take more squadmates in a mission or beef up yourself and fewer squadmates. A gear is more like fighting in Iron Man’s armor (sans flying) rather then piloting a big mech. You can walk or go faster on wheels (it looks like you are skating). There is a huge variety of weapons available from the get go, but you are limited in how much you can carry and improve your gear until you progress through the game. You can also choose to be different gears from light to heavy; unfortunately, your choice is permanent unless you make a different character. I started with a medium model, but was getting my butt kicked so I chose the heavy and did much better. The game is a lot of fun until you get to about mission 15 or 16; from here until the end of the game, with 1 or 2 exceptions, the missions are really hard or hard to finish because you can’t figure out what to do or timed or a combination of the aforementioned. The missions have frustrating aspects such as difficult jumping puzzles, long missions (with no in mission save of course), pointlessly difficult missions, missions with hard to complete objectives, and the last great mission where you complete your task and then have 3 minutes to run out of a station in zero g with tunnels all over the place. How about just ending the game with a cut scene when I do what I need to? If it wasn’t for the last third of the game I really would have enjoyed it more, but try it and make your own call.

NOLF 2 is the sequel to The Operative: No One Loves Forever. I really enjoyed NOLF so I was looking forward to playing NOLF 2. Unfortunately, NOLF 2 was good, but not as good as NOLF. There are some nice improvements like not having to select which gadget to use on something like a lock; the game picks the right gadget for you when you try to “use” the something that requires a gadget. However, it seemed like gadgets were a lot less important in this game; compared to NOLF, I hardly felt like I was using many gadgets at all. There was also no load out screen before each mission (although this would have been impossible since some missions start in the field). You are simply given certain items to use as needed like bugs for phones, etc.

**SPOILER ALERT**

One of the main differences I noticed between the two games was that the second seemed a lot easier. I believe this was a combination of being able to upgrade your character through skills points (which you receive for completing certain tasks and finding intelligence items) and the lack of many stealth missions. At least in NOLF 2 points could be used for something; in the first game, points simply were for scoring your performance.  But once you max out your health and armor, your character is very hard to kill; there was only one point in the game which I found very difficult and was killed (when fighting the mime assassin guy). Other boss battles were easy compared to the first game: fighting Volkov was a joke compared to your fight with him in NOLF, and the 2 or 3 fights against the ninja woman were not very difficult.

As I stated earlier, the second difference was a lack of stealth missions. In NOLF there were many missions where you could not be seen and/or kill anyone; this equated to a lot of sneaking around and could be quite difficult. In NOLF 2, I think there was only one part where you had to sneak into an office; otherwise, you could pretty much go “Rambo” on everyone – setting off alarms just brought some extra guards to fight.

Furthermore, some of the missions felt tacked on and of no particular relevance to to overall story, which was not nearly as good as NOLF’s story. In the beginning of the game, the missions are pretty long and have good pacing with some fun snowmobile driving. Later, you spend time running around India away from police who you cannot hurt; in one part of a mission, you even have to remove wanted posters of yourself for no apparent purpose.  Also, there is the mission where you protect Indians from super soldiers by opening gates or dousing fires with buckets of water; meantime, super soldiers, who you cannot kill yet, are firing at you. Another mission has you running around UNITY HQ shooting mimes and removing bombs, again for no other reason than to give you something to do. And the final mission, where you finally get to fight the super soldiers, was not very difficult at all.

Overall I liked NOLF 2, but it just wasn’t up to the caliber of NOLF. There was only one mystery in the game (what is Project Omega?) and once you solve that, there are no more surprises. This game could easily have been just another shooter with a few gadgets thrown in for kicks. Although there is a part where you have to get out of a trap in 60 seconds, nothing NOLF 2 presents is as cool as falling out of an airplane trying to get a parachute in NOLF. Anyone who liked NOLF will enjoy NOLF 2, just don’t expect a repeat of a great spy game.