Others say...

"Ever dream of driving a 40-foot tall robot? "
I had a lot of fun with this game. While I'm not really into first-person shooters, this one actually delivered some great gameplay in a very unique gaming world. The game does have a few minor games; however, overall it's easily worth the price.

Gameplay: You pilot huge robots armed to the teeth and kill other robots similarly armed. Period. There is a story line with the single-player campaign, but it's quite forgettable. The real fun lies in customizing your mech in the mechlab and getting to battle. There are 25 missions in the campaign, and overall they are quite good. Some of the missions are rather easy and you can finish them in a few minutes. Others are very hard and will take several re-tries (and an occasional lowering of the difficulty level for those of us who are not experts at Mechwarrior games). The interface is pretty clean and useful, and I was able to navigate just fine with my old Microsoft Sidewinder gamepad. Unfortunately, this games does suffer from the same minor, but irritating, problems of past games in the series. For example, the mission briefings can still be vague and long-winded, and sometimes you'll have to play out a mission 1 or 2 times unsuccessfully just to figure out what you're supposed to do. Also, you can't save in the middle of a mission. This wouldn't be a problem if the missions were fairly short, but many of them are not. Finally, AI opponents fight well and use good tactics, but AI allies (lancemates) can have some pathfinding issues.

Graphics: The game looks very good, even today. The mechs have good detail, and the weapon effects are great. Even the terrains are nice to look at. Footage of human actors are used for mission briefings, and the introductory movie is Hollywood quality. Some of the environments are destructible, but not in a major way.

Sounds: The developers outdid themselves here. The sound effects are superb and very appropriate. Also, the soundtrack for the game is worth buying separately. Voice acting is good, but sometimes a little cheesy and over the top. Overall, the game's sounds are done well.

Techical matters: With the patch, the game was very stable on my computer. It came with a very useful instruction manual as well. Overall, the single-player campaign lasted me about 20-25 hours. I don't think the campaign has much replay appeal, but thankfully you can do player vs. computer skirmishes under various conditions and play against other people online.

Overall, Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance is a very good game, and perhaps the best one in the series. It's fairly easy to learn and is well put together. I recommend it to anyone into sci-fi gaming or shooters.

"Mech Warrior 4:Cool!"
Mechwarrior 4:Vengeance is a tight game.The graphics are awesome.Its challenging but also very easy.The game also includes multiplayer where you get to play online. My favorite thing about this game is master trials. For a 5 year old game its one of my best favorites. Thats why I rate it a perfect 5.

"Great gameplay for a beginning mechwarrior."
I have played Mechwarrior 3 in the past and really enjoyed it. This game is much better by far. This game had everything. Lots of various levels. Plenty of upgradeable mechs. A pretty good story line and great graphics for it's time. Get a good a joystick and go kick butt.

"Pretty Good"
I've played Mech Warrior 2,3 and now 4. And I would have to say of all of them Mech Warrior 3 was over all the best. In Mech 4 my biggest complaint is that the mech's movement is not all together realistic. They move to fast. In Mech 3 they seemed much more realistic in their movement. They were the lumbering giants that they were supposed to be, not running around like little toys. The missile firings and weapons firing are better in Mech 3 as well, more realistic. I do like Mech 4's Mech Lab as it makes weapons loading more realistic to each mech. I still do enjoy Mech 4 though ,and it is fun to play, but it seems to me that with some small improvements in certain areas, they should have stuck to a good thing with Mech Warrior 3 and just made some more senarios like Pirates Moon.

"good game, bad balancing"
Like all mechwarrior games, this one has too many controls to memorize. Aside from that, the graphics are stunning (the exception being the badly acted movies) the mechs are badass and the overall game pretty good. Unfortunately, most of the enemies in this game seem to require ungodly amounts of damage to take down making it nearly impossible to take on more than two or three enemy mechs before your own chassis is a smoldering ruin. I miss the good old days when a single alpha strike from a 100 ton atlas pretty much busted up anything that moved.