While I mostly enjoyed my time with Front Mission Evolved, I found it to be a seriously flawed experience.

I'll start with the negatives: I'm not sure if this game is very unbalanced, or if I'm just not that great at playing it. On normal difficulty, the main parts of the missions are challenging, but fun. However, the bosses (especially the later ones) I found to be disproportionately difficult to the point of being frustrating. On easy, most of each mission is a total cake walk, and the bosses are manageable. If there was some setting in between these two, that would be ideal. From a story standpoint, that narrative starts out seeming like it could be decent, but quickly devolves into hodgepodge of bad action movie and anime movie cliches. Also, I experienced a few crashes to desktop during the campaign.

All, that being said, there were enough redeeming qualities here to make me want to finish the campaign. First and foremost, the core game play loop is quite satisfying. Customizing your mech with different types of weapons and armor and taking it into battle to blow up a bunch of other mechs is really fun. There's a pretty varied selection of weapons to choose from, so you can completely change your play style between levels. Also, many of the missions also have on-foot or on-rails segments that offer a change of pace without outstaying their welcome. The flow of each level was very simple, but I found that to be perfectly acceptable. Pretty much it goes like this: walk to checkpoint, kill all the enemies there, proceed to next checkpoint, repeat.

Overall, this game had some quality game play at its core, but was in need of some refinements. It's a shame there was never a sequel (that I'm aware of) to work out these kinks. If the idea of using giant robot to blow up a bunch of other giant robots appeals to you, and you have some patience, this game is probably worth a go if you can get it cheap.