Big robots - you gotta love 'em. All that stomping about, blasting anything that takes your fancy with a huge range of ridiculously powerful weapons is very satisfying, but Activision's latest puts a unique new spin on the proceedings.
Andy Butcher

A couple of years ago, when Activision lost their license to produce games based on FASA's BattleTech board game, the company didn't take it lying down. Instead, the team behind the popular and successful MechWarrior series cast about for a new universe of constant warfare and big robots on which to base their games. They found just what they were looking for in Dream Pod 9's Heavy Gear, one of BattleTech's main competitors.

Sadly, the first of the Heavy Gear games was, to be honest, something of a disappointment; a halfway house that failed to make the most of the potential of the Heavy Gear board game and that felt like a cut-down MechWarrior 2-and-a-half. Now Heavy Gear has returned. Redesigned and rebuilt from the ground up, Heavy Gear II is more than up to the challenge of the other two 'big robot' lines, as represented by MechWarrior III and StarSiege. In fact, it's the best of the bunch.

For a start, the new graphics engine takes full advantage of modern 3D technology, offering complex, fully articulated Gears (the Heavy Gear term for the robots themselves), smoothly detailed landscapes and some very nice special effects and lighting. More importantly though, it also makes excellent use of the unique style of Dream Pod 9's tabletop system. Sticking much closer to the Manga animations that inspired all these games, the Gears themselves are far smaller than those of MechWarrior III or StarSiege, more powered suits than massive death machines. This makes them much more agile and responsive, at the cost of some survivability. If MechWarrior III's Mechs are walking tanks, these Gears are more like futuristic infantry.