Metaltech: Earthsiege (1994)

Date: 1994
Developer: Dynamix
Publisher: Sierra On-line

System Requirements:
 - 386DX/33MHz
 - 4MB RAM
 - 27MB HDD
 - MSDOS 5.0
 - VGA Capable Video Card

Where to purchase?

 - It is FREE!  Hi-Rez Studios, the owners of the Tribes (and Metaltech) IPs have released all the old games in these series as free downloads.

 - Download links


For my next game, I'm moving on from the 4X genre but I'm sticking with a scifi themed game.  I'm going to be playing Metaltech: Earthsiege by Dynamix, a giant robot mech sim game.  I messed around with this game a bit when it originally came out and a friend of mine had a copy, but I never progressed beyond the first or second mission.  I remember thinking this game was the best thing I had ever seen when I originally played it as a teenager, so I'm curious to see how it has aged.  When compared to the relatively simple games I had been playing at the time such as Wolfenstein 3d, Doom, or Rebel Assault, Earthsiege blew me away with its amazing polygonal graphics, FMV-type characters, sound effects, and complex simulation gameplay.  I'll give it an honest try and see how far I can make it before I decide to move on to the next game.

Lets jump into Sierra's ripoff competitor to the Battletech universe!

- Development -

Before I get into the development story of Earthsiege, I should clarify what I mean by a giant robot mech sim.  In games like Earthsiege, the player pilots a giant robot (mech) as if it was a tank or any other war machine.  For the most part, but not always, these mech games lean more towards a simulation than pure action game.  While not nearly as complicated as an average flight simulator, mech games often had controls that were complicated enough to warrant needing a keyboard layout reference document and lengthy manual.  In another similarity to flight sims, missions typically involve moving to different waypoints on a large map with wingmen in tow.  In many of these games, players needed to manage different subsystems of their mech such as energy, shields, radar, communications, and weapons.  On this spectrum of complexity, I would say Earthsiege falls on the more complicated end, but we'll see when I get into actually playing it.

Earthsiege came out in 1994, right at the beginning of a new wave of mech games, the most well known of which has to be Mechwarrior 2 in 1995.  It would be impossible to talk about the history of mech games without mentioning the Mechwarrior games and the Battletech Universe from which they come.  Mechwarrior 2, by Activision, is part of the Battletech Universe by FASA Corporation, the company that really started bringing mech games to western mainstream gamers.  Battletech is actually a board game/war game that was started and developed by FASA Corporation way back in 1984.  It has a quite detailed and elaborate universe, much like Warhammer 40K, that has been expanded over the decades through novels, comics, games, and even a TV series.  To learn more about the Battletech Universe, check out this link to the wiki.  The first big release for PC that allowed gamers to pilot a mech from the first person perspective was Mechwarrior in 1989, actually developed by Dynamix when they still had a publishing agreement with Activision.  While not the first computer game released in the Battletech Universe (that would be Battletech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception in 1988), it was the first "mech sim" game that was a precursor to the genre of mech games such as Earthsiege and others that we still see today.

Mechwarrior (1989)

Dynamix, the developer behind the original Mechwarrior and Earthsiege, was formed in 1984 by Jeff Tunnell and Damon Slye.  While I always associated Dynamix with simulator games, but while researching for this post I discovered they developed games in many other different genres.  In the mid 1980s, Dynamix also developed games for the C64, Atari ST, and Amiga in addition to PC DOS.  Some of their diverse early games from the 1980s and 1990s include ArcticFox (1986 tank sim), Championship Baseball (1986 sports), Deathtrack (1989 action racing), The Adventures of Willy Beamish (1991 adventure), The Incredible Machine (1992 puzzle), Betrayal at Krondor (1993 RPG), and Alien Legacy (1993 strategy) among many other games.  A lot of their games are well regarded and some of them, like Red Baron (1990 flight sim) and The Incredible Machine are considered classics.  Before this, I didn't know Dynamix has such a diverse development background.

A lot of their games did lean towards the sim genre, with many tank simulators and flight sims in their development history.  I assume their good record of developing sim games is part of the reason why Activision came to them to develop Mechwarrior.  I could not find any information on why Dynamix switched from Activision to Sierra On-Line, except a note on Wikipedia stating they did self-publish their games for a short period in between working for the two big publishers.  Unfortunately I also could not find any details about the decision to begin working on a direct competitor to the Battletech games.  If I were to guess, I would assume Activision still  held the rights to Battletech, and Dynamix/Sierra On-Line saw that new computer technology and the current gaming market was perfect for developing a mech sim.   Their history developing Mechwarrior gave them more experience in this than any other developer in the field at the time, but without the Battletech license, they had to create a new IP.  So instead of creating a "one and done" game, they created the Metaltech Universe which gave them the opportunity to have a similar universe to Battletech that they could develop over the course of multiple games.

Metaltech was not nearly as successful as Battletech, but it did last for quite a while and eventually became known as the Tribes Universe, named after the successful Tribes series of games.  Multiple games were developed using the Metaltech Universe, although a lot of them barely have anything to do with the original universe as developed for Earthsiege.  Games such as the side-scroller Hunter Hunted (1996) and the Tribes series of games are technically in the same universe as Earthsiege but there isn't a lot to indicate this.  Still, Metaltech has been around for a long time.  The last game released that is technically part of this license was Tribes: Ascend in 2012.

Earthsiege released in 1994 with an expansion pack and speech pack released in 1995.  From what I recall, the game received relatively good reviews at the time.  The polygonal, texture mapped graphics were pretty revolutionary for the time and, combined with the fantastic sound and animation, made the whole presentation impressive.  It sold well enough to warrant 2 sequels (Earthsiege 2 in 1995 and Starsiege in 1998), but unfortunately it was overshadowed by the release of the fantastic Mechwarrior 2 by Activision in 1995.

Earthsiege (1994)

Earthsiege 2 (1995)

Starsiege (1998)

Just for fun - Mechwarrior Online (2013)

- The Game - 

The game installed and runs fine for me in DOSBox without any extra tweaking using the link from Hi-Rez, which is nice.  Upon starting it up I'm greeted with a summary of the current situation:

Five hundred years in the future, mankind is fighting a desperate battle for survival.  Sentient cybrid war machines have rebelled against their human masters and crushed the great military powers of the world.  Using stolen Cybrid technology, bands of guerrilla fighters have survived the prolonged assaults and are now beginning to carry the fight to the machines.  The next few months will tell whether man or machine inherits the earth...
After twenty years of constant warfare, mankind has driven the Cybrid killing machines from his  homeworld.  For a short ime, earth reveled in her freedom and began the long task of rebuilding her cities.  But the sweet taste of victory proved all too fleeting.  Before anyone could have possibly imagined, mankind faced a new and graver Cybrid threat.
From captured human outposts and colonies across the solar system, Cybrid ships of war have begun to blast off for Earth.  Estimates placed the arrival of the first Cybrind scout ships at only ninety days.
That was nearly three months ago...

After the background text, I'm dumped into the main menu, which looks like this:

Main Menu

I started a new career (name: RPDG Eggtown), and an animation plays that I think shows a Cybrid scout ship landing on the moon and disgorging a Cybrid HERC.  HERCs are the mechs that both the humans and Cybrids control.  It stands for Humaniform-Emulation Roboticized Combat Unit with Leg-Articulated Navigation, or HERCULAN, shortened to HERC.

Cybrind emerging from its ship

I am then greeted by what I assume is my commander.  He uses the same kind of FMV animation as the LucasArts game Rebel Assault.  His body is a static image taken from film and only his face moves with speech.  I think this was pretty common in the early FMV-era of games.  He tells me that Cybrids have taken over all the human colonies and outposts, but had beat them on Earth.  But now Cybrid ships seem to be making their way to Earth to attack our home planet.

My commander

After this briefing, I am taken to the "Service Bay" where I can outfit my HERC, change my crew of wingmen and their HERCs, or go the mission briefing.

Service Bay with "Gut" the mechanic/engineer

And here is what it looks like to outfit my HERC with different weapons.

This is actually pretty cool.  You can see each hardpoint on the HERC and the weapons switch out in realtime as I scroll through the different options on the right, so I can get a quick look at what my HERC will look at with my current loadout.

There are limited HERCs and limited weapons to distribute to myself and my team at the beginning of the game.  A big part of the game is collecting salvage after a mission to build new HERCs, repair HERCs, and equip new weapons.  Collecting salvage is done by destroying enemy HERCs without destroying their weapons or preserving as much of the wreckage of the HERC as possible.  So destroying a HERCs leg and causing it to fall to the ground is preferable to destroying its central chest area and causing the whole vehicle to blow up.

Crew 

The crew screen lets me chose which crew members and take and which HERC they will using.  This is where I can also switch out my HERC.  I've decided to switch from the smaller Tomahawk to the larger Patriot for this first mission.  Here is what my Patriot looks like with the default loadout:

Clicking on the "Briefing" button brings me to another animation of my commander explaining the mission and then there is a nice animation of a map of the mission area:

Briefing map

This mission will have me doing a standard patrol by going to a series of waypoints and destorying any HERCs I encounter.  This is a pretty standard mission in not only mech games, but flight sims and tanks sims as well.  

Mission loading screen

After a brief loading screen that looks awesome, the game begins with me in the cockpit of my HERC.

My first view of gameplay

But before I do anything, the game controls are complicated enough that I need to spend some time reading the manual. Unfortunately the game doesn't come with any kind of tutorial.  The manual is a whopping 80 pages long, which I love.  I miss old manuals like that.

So...the controls are...terrible.  TERRIBLE.  And they seem to be not reconfigurable.  This is going to be a problem.  The game is built to be used with a joystick, but despite this, and even though the game is over 20 years old, I can't understand how these controls made sense at the time.  Here are the movement/turret controls:

Throttle Up/Reverse = Up/Down arrows
Steer entire mech (not just turret) = L/R arrows
Turret Up = I
Turret Down = M
Turret Left = J
Turret Right = K
Pan View Left = F9
Pan View Right = F10
Fire = Space

I can right click and hold to move the turret around in real time, but I can't control my throttle and hit the SPACEBAR key at the same time to fire while also using the mouse.  I think I'm going to have to just  put both hands on the keyboard and ignore the mouse.  This is not optimal.

On the plus side, the cockpit is very interactive.  I can click on a whole slew of different buttons and switches, and I can even move the mouse to the bottom of the screen and click to look down onto a map screen that has a bunch of other options.  So I'm digging all the interactivity.

OK, enough about me complaining about the controls, lets get started with my patrol mission!  Here is my HERC from the outside:

I like my huge EMP gun on my head.  Its my hat of electromagnetic death

It doesn't take long before I come across my first enemies near the first waypoint.  They are enemy HERCs or a similar build to me.  My wingman is good about automatically attacking, but I do have the option of opening communication channels and telling them things like hold back, attack my target, or return to base.

I have my lasers and EMP linked to shoot together.  The orange streak is one of my lasers and the big ball is my EMP.  I'm going OK just attacking the enemies without target their specific systems, but I want to try blowing up just their legs so I can get more salvage.  But with the awful controls, I can't easily tilt my turret up and down.  So I find myself just setting my turret in a looking down position, the maneuvering my HERC to good positions where my turret is looking at the enemy's legs.  It is pretty damn awkward.  Here is a GIF of me finally getting the leg of an enemy:

Gotcha! (finally)

I'm also liking the simple lighting effect of the explosion in this nighttime environment.  There wasn't much to the rest of the mission.  I went from waypoint to waypoint killing enemy HERCs while trying not to shoot my wingman.  I found my HERC's movement to be kind of slow so I might switch out to a faster scout class HERC for my next mission.  I also didn't like the EMP that much because it was such a slow firing weapon.  I also accidentally fired off a lot of my missiles before I had encountered my first enemy.  I'll need to work on learning to use missiles better.

A common sight, my wingman getting in the way during a fight

Returning to base at the final waypoint

Success!

After finishing the mission, I'm given a mission debriefing by my commander where I can also look at the salvage I collected:

    

At the Service Bay, I manually repaired each part that was damaged.  I should now be ready for the next mission.  It looks like it is going to be another standard patrol mission.  This time I am switching to a Tomahawk scout HERC and I'm equipping it with 4 lasers and a particle beam on its head.  Here is my new machine of Cybrid death:

My particle beam hat

It looks like its another night time mission.  Here's my sweet new scout HERC in action:

Tomahawk

And here is the map/damage/communication interface I can access by clicking at the bottom of my cockpit:

I'm encountering enemies right away and they are really doing some damage to my HERC.  Here I cam taking one out, but you can also see my wingman calling for help.

Sorry Glenn, I've got my own problems right now.

Ouch.  After the first 2 fights, I've got some serious damage to my cockpit area.

My next fight did not go so well...

Well...shit

Cool, there is a short cutscene that plays when I die.  The Cybrids are doing something with my brain.

I think they are making me into a Cybrid.  It would be fun if I could then continue the campaign, but as a Cybrid fighting the humans.  Too bad there wasn't a big mod seen back in 1994, that could have been a fun mod.  Oh well, time to load my game.

I...what?

I never saved my game apparently.  I thought it automatically saved after each mission since there wasn't an obvious SAVE/LOAD option at the main menu.  Crap.  Well time to create a new player and start over.  At least it was only 1 mission in.  Let's try this again.  This time I'm going try the Samson, which the manual says is the second heaviest HERC and specializes in search and destroy.

My Samson

As an interesting historical aside, Samson was a Hebrew biblical leader who did some pretty awesome feats of badass.  Per Wikipedia:

The biblical account states that Samson was a Nazirite, and that he was given immense strength to aid him against his enemies and allow him to perform superhuman feats,^[2] including slaying a lion with his bare hands and massacring an entire army of Philistines using only the jawbone of an ass. However, if Samson's long hair was cut, then his Nazirite vow would be violated, and he would lose his strength.

So I should make sure to protect my massic ELF weapon on my head and I should be fine.  This Samson HERC is armed to the teeth.  I'm going into this mission with 4 autocannons, 2 lasers, a particle beam weapon, and an electron flux weapon (ELF) that shoots a constant stream of electricity at close range.  

Now my first mission is in the daytime, so the weather must be somewhat random, that's a nice bonus.  

My Samson

Man this thing is a lot slower than the Tomahawk from my previous try, but assume it is going to make up for it in weaponry and armor.  

And holy crap does it ever.  I am blasting through these enemies now way easier than with my previous HERCs.  I have all my weapons linked together so they fire at the same time, and it only takes a couple shots to destroy an enemy now.  Also, the autocannons have longer range than the lasers so I can start shooting while the enemies are still a long ways out.  Here is me taking out two enemies like it is nothing:

The only downside is the Samson really is slow so its taking me a lot longer to finish the missions.  

After finishing this mission, I checked out the Build menu where I can build new HERCs:

I'll try misison 2 then see about building a new HERC.  

Mission 2 goes well for me.  I like blasting the tops off enemy HERCS and then watching them run around like a chicken with its head cut off:

The Cybrids also started sending these spider mines after me:

Spider mine

They didn't do that much damage to me, but they were annoying and too much work to kill.  After finishing mission 2, I started building a Rhino HERC that is a step below the Samson I believe.  I started construction on it but it will take a few missions to complete.

Mission 3 looks like I'm getting away from the standard patrol mission.  It is a special assignment where I need to deliver some research materials to a lab and then protect the lab if it comes under attack.  I really don't like escort missions in these kinds of games, but I'll reserve judgement until I've tried it out first.

Mission 3 started out well enough.  I don't have any wingmen, but I blew up some enemy Cybrids and was making my way towards the lab when I was jumped by 4 enemies at the same time.  And they looked like big HERCs too.

Oh no, not looking good! 

Really not looking good!

It was not good

To add insult to injury, my computer crashed when I clicked Continue above.  The Cybrids really did get to me.  I had to close out everything in Task Manager.  So lets try this again.

I died again

I feel like I'm doing something wrong here.  I'll try the biggest HERC I have, the Colossus.  Here she is in action:

 And this is the result:

I died 4 or 5 more times before I was randomly told that my HERC was disabled and instead of dying, friendly forces rescued me and I was given the option to continue on with the next mission.

Boss isn't happy about my failure

The next mission is a base attack, our base is under attack!  I'll give it a shot, but I still feel like something isn't right here since I'm dying so quickly.

That went how I expected

Alright, I died so I'm going back to the laboratory escort mission.  I'm going to figure this out.  It looks like I haven't been taking wingmen, so that could have something to do with it.  I need to take wingmen to soak up some of that incoming missile and laser fire.

Sacrifices...er...wingmen

I've also been driving straight on into the oncoming HERCs and relying on my shields and armor to soak up damage.  I'm going to try driving around the enemies and playing more of a hit-and-run strategy.  Let's give it a shot.

After a few more deaths, I've defeated the first big group of enemy HERCs that were killing me!  My strategies with my new wingmen worked!  Also, what the hell is this thing:

That seems unfair, I don't any quadraped HERCs

This is a giant, 4-legged HERC that has 4 huge EMP guns on its back.  This is probably what was killing me so many times before.  It is a beast and took quite a bit to take down.  Oh well, I've done it so moving on to the laboratory...

What?? Why?

...And then this pops up.  I've failed my mission.  I don't know why, but I assume the laboratory got destroyed while I was fighting these other HERCs.  Oh gee I'm sorry, did I not save your life fast enough because I was too busy fighting a giant robot tiger with 4 huge energy cannons on its back!?  Screw it, I'm not redoing this mission.  I'm moving on to the next one.  The next mission, just like earlier, is a base defense mission.  Our base is under attack!  This time I was able to beat this mission in one try with only one wingman.  I was rewarded with a nice "attaboy" by my boss:

And I also received the message that our researchers have developed a new HERC: The Apocalypse!  That sounds powerful. 

I can't use the new HERC until I've built it, but I am still building the Rhino I started back in Mission 2 and it won't be done for one more mission.  I am also out of wingmen.  Their pictures are greyed out, which I think means they are injured and can't partake in missions right now, so it looks like I'm on my own.  The next mission is a recon mission.  I'll give it a shot.

I tried the recon mission and I stomped around from waypoint to waypoint getting harassed by a flying unit.  You can kind of see it in the screenshot below:

It didn't do much damage, but after I destroyed one another would take its place.  It was kind of cool to see my base's defense turrets shooting at the little guy too.  Despite going to each waypoint, I did not encounter any other enemies but I wasn't able to end the mission.  I was never prompted with a mission complete message, and pressing Q to quit warned me that my mission was incomplete.  So I don't know what was going on with that.  When I did opt to quit the mission, the game crashed again and I had to force close from the task manager.

I'm going to end my playthrough of Earthsiege now.  I'm disappointed in myself for not wanting to stick it out longer, and I'm disappointed in the game for not making me want to stick it out longer.  Read my review below to see my full thoughts.

- Review -

Earthsiege was a disappointment for me, there is no reason to beat around the bush.  Which really bums me out because I had/have really strong nostalgia feelings for this game.  Some of my best gaming memories are my friend and I hunched over his CRT monitor taking turns playing missions on his copy of Earthsiege.  I was blown away by its graphics and gameplay at the time, so I was excited and hopeful when I decided to replay the game for my website.  But it just did not live up to those memories.  

First, the positive aspects of the game.  It was ground breaking and very advanced for when it came out.  It was the first big mech game, besides Mechwarrior, to have a major release and it was the first in a series of Metaltech games.  It's graphics were state of the art, featuring texture mapped ground and HERCs, instead of the flat gouraud shading found in other contemporary 3D polygonal games.  The cockpits are excellent with all their detail and interactivity.  It really does a nice job of making me feel like I am in a 100 ton war machine stomping off to war.  It is slow and pondering, as a huge mech should be.  I also liked the diversity in weapons.  Not only does it have many different classes of weapons, but many of the weapons also can be replaced by upgraded versions as the campaign progresses.  So an EMP can become an EMP2, provided you have found one on a Cybrid and were able to salvage it.  Speaking of the salvage, that is also a great addition to the game and reinforces that the humans are the true underdogs in this war against machines.  It does not come across as an afterthought and it is an integral part of  the campaign.  

Wow...after listing all those things I now feel like I'm being unfair to Earthsiege by not liking it.  But the problem is that the game just wasn't any fun to play.  I've covered the controls earlier in my playthrough, but I'll just reiterate that it really is a problem.  I don't blame this necessarily on the developers since this game was breaking new ground and they were having to create this control scheme from scratch without other precedents to rely on, but it is a huge liability for the game.  This came out before WASD control, so using the arrow keys made sense at the time, but I don't know why they couldn't have made the left mouse button shoot and allow for easier turret control.  As it is now, I just played the game as if my turret could not move side to side, and I did not use the up and down tilt very often.  I played it more as if it were a tank simulator.  Maybe it would have been more fun with a joystick, but I don't have one right now.  

I also found the difficulty to be super uneven.  Some missions (like the laboratory escort mission) seemed damn near impossible, while other missions I was able to breeze through.  It is definitely a tough game.  I might be being a little unfair here because I think games like this just were more difficult than modern games.  Without the internet and mods and DLC, developers had to make their game last a long time and an easy way of doing this was to make them quite difficult.  This is a generalization, but I feel like simulation games like this from the 1990s were more difficult than their distant relatives of today.  A game like Mechwarrior 4 has a lot more action, is faster paced, and easier than Earthsiege.  I've always considered myself a purist when it comes to PC gaming and I often find myself complaining about the "dumbing down" of modern games.  But here is a case where I just could not get into the slower and more difficult gameplay of an older DOS game, and that is sad for me.  Maybe Earthsiege isn't a bad game, but is a hard game to get into now in 2018.

In the end, would I recommend the game to someone who has never played it before?  Nope.  I don't think a modern gamer is going to like this game.  But would I recommend it to someone who played it in the 90s and wants to go back and check it out again?  You bet.  Its free and I think it is worth the download just to remind yourself how games used to be back then.  And who knows, maybe you'll get more engrossed in the game than I and have a great time.