Gameplay in Heavy Gear takes after MechWarrior in many respects. Seen here, Scott infiltrates the Draco in an enemy Gear. Gameplay Mission objectives can run the gamut. The final mission of Heavy Gear takes place in the shadow of the two downed landships as Lieutentant Brockton and Ranger Scott fight a duel to the death, with the victor gaining control of both ships. After the grounding, Commandant Robert Murène of the Draco contacts the Vigilance directly, proposing a duel to decide the fate of the two crippled ships that would pit its recently reinstated Duelist, Ranger Scott, against his duplicitous former superior officer Lieutenant Jennifer Brockton, who was revealed earlier to be the one who shot and killed the captive Henry Janus. ![]() ![]() The two ships make several attempts to prevail over the other, and in the end both are grounded. The latter missions of Heavy Gear's campaign are mostly concerned with a battle for supremacy between the Vigilance and the Draco, a landship of the AST. When the dust settles, Colonel Janus is dead. Enraged by Scott's words, Colonel Janus challenges him to a one-on-one duel. Eventually, Scott is no longer able to tolerate his commanding officer's thinly-veiled antipathy toward him, and informs Janus that his own son, when offered an opportunity to escape with him, had refused, mistakenly believing that his captors would treat him with civility. In spite of Janus' best efforts, Ranger Scott continues to complete his missions successfully, though Janus continually tries to paint Scott as nothing more than a liability to the CNCS. Having lost his son, Colonel Arthur Janus of the Vigilance becomes antagonistic toward Scott, stripping him of his title as Duelist and making several transparent attempts to get him killed in the line of duty. While Scott is able to escape captivity and return to the Vigilance, his charge, believing that he will be treated fairly as a prisoner of war, chooses to remain behind, and is ultimately killed. Though as Duelist Scott is recognized as the most capable Gear pilot on the Vigilance, his fortunes soon take a turn for the worse when he and his subordinate Henry Janus are taken by surprise during a mission and subsequently captured by soldiers of the Allied Southern Territories (AST). The campaign mode of Heavy Gear is set on the world of Terra Nova, and follows the actions of Senior Ranger Edward Scott, a Gear pilot in the armies of the Confederated Northern City-States (CNCS) and the Duelist of the Landship Vigilance. ![]() ![]() Plot Senior Ranger Edward Scott, the hero and player character of Heavy Gear, talks to a superior officer. Heavy Gear includes a story-based 32-mission campaign mode, in which completing missions progresses the story and gains the player access to better Gears and equipment over time, a Tour of Duty mode where players can fight through non-narrative campaigns consisting of randomly generated scenarios, and an online multiplayer component which was supported at the time of its release by MPlayer. Like the MechWarrior games, players are able to customize their bipedal war machines, known here as Gears, in various ways before piloting them personally during a variety of combat scenarios. Though Heavy Gear represents a clean break from Activision's previous mech simulation games on a fictional level, its gameplay is fairly similar to that of the MechWarrior franchise, and its game engine is in fact an adaptation of the one used in MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries. While Activision had, prior to Heavy Gear, spent a significant amount of resources producing mech piloting games within the BattleTech universe, including MechWarrior, MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat, MechWarrior 2: Ghost Bear's Legacy, and MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries, FASA Corporation, the proprietor of the BattleTech name at the time, chose not to renew their licensing agreement with Activision due in large part to the lengthy development cycle of MechWarrior 2, in turn leading Activision to acquire the rights to another giant robot property, namely Heavy Gear. Released for Windows 95 by developer and publisher Activision in late 1997, Heavy Gear is an action-heavy first-person mech simulation game that takes place within the Heavy Gear universe published by Dream Pod 9.
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