Source: Next Generation – Issue Number 9 – September 1995
There have been a lot of mech games over the years. There are only few I have spent serious time playing and MechWarrior 2 is one of those. In my opinion, it is still one of the best.
MechWarrior 2, like the other MechWarrior games, is part of the BattleTech universe. MechWarrior 2 was originally written as a DOS game in 1995 but was ported to Windows and Macintosh as well as to the PlayStation and Sega Saturn. As the player you must choose one of two clans that are at war with each other. After making your choice, you will pilot a mech in a variety of missions with various goals. As the game progresses, you can further modify your mech and can eventually issue commands to your own squad. MechWarrior 2 is a cross between a tactical simulator and first person combat. It really plays much like a flight simulator only with mechs instead of planes and it is awesome.
Unfortunately, they went in a little different direction with the console ports. The arcade aspects were emphasized more and the game was simplified somewhat. Some will no doubt like this better but to me it ruined the game. I loved the simulation aspect of the original computer versions and to change that makes it a much different game.
So if you want to give this one a try, the DOS or Windows versions are definitely the ones you want to chose from. The problem is that these are relatively difficult to get working on modern hardware. MechWarrior 2 has not been re-released for modern hardware and is not available via distributors like GoG or Steam. Getting this game to work is complicated by the fact that there were different versions released for different 3D accelerators as well. There are tutorials out there for getting the Windows version to work on a modern system and I suspect that you can get the non 3D accelerated version to work via DOSbox but I haven’t tried it (and you would lose out on some textures). However, despite the dated 3D graphics and extra effort required to get this one up an running on modern hardware, it is well worth it. Whenever you see a list of top 100 games this one is typically in it and for good reason. Hopefully it will show up on GoG one of these days…
