The graphics in Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire are beautiful. They really are. The models and environments are detailed and, quite frankly, look the way they should. I am not the biggest Gundam fan, but I've been around enough to see some models and these look great.

The problem with Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire's graphics, however, is the camera. Instead of following behind you, you are given full control over the camera. If you're facing forward and you turn left, the camera remains the direction it was facing, allowing you to watch as your mecha faces the left side of the screen. Worse yet, you can turn around 180 degrees and face the camera. While this makes for great screenshots, it doesn't do much for gameplay. I could understand if this were an optional feature, but requiring the player to move the camera every time they change heading is a bit ridiculous.

The score in Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire consists of orchestral music, a welcome change from the techno and alternative that many games slap onto a game regardless of the game's content. My wife told me that it sounded like I was watching a cartoon at one point, so my guess is that the music was doing its job well.

The sound effects sound appropriate, from the machine guns firing to the clanging of your Gundam when it lands after a jump. The in-game voice work is well done and useful, but the dialogue in some of the video that advances the story seems wooden and uninspired.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire can be frustratingly difficult at times. The camera controls adds to this pain. More on this in other sections, but I wanted to mention both here, as both the difficulty and the camera controls can really affect the gameplay to their detriment at times.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire lives up to its name, proving to be more "mecha" than "mech". I'll go into more detail on this in the Game Mechanics section, for those who want the details, but what this means in a nutshell is that you can use a sword for melee fighting and that the controls, while being somewhat complex, feel more like a Third Person Shooter with complex controls rather than a futuristic war simulation, such as Chrome Hounds or Steel Battalions.

In Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire, you'll need to do more than just pilot a mech. You're in control of a special unit that is thrown together using a prototype Gundam that was being tested when the Zeons unexpectedly attacked. The game follows your career for three (very important) months during the last three months of the One Year War. You will have to learn to pilot your Gundam and manage your new special unit. Your duties include choosing and requesting new pilots, purchasing new mecha units, upgrading your mecha units, even selling back old mecha units that you no longer want. The management aspect of Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire is a myriad of trade-offs. After a mission, your Gundam will be repaired in the hanger automatically. That is, the process is begun automatically. How long your Gundam is out of commission depends on how badly it was damaged. This can be an issue for a couple of reasons. The most obvious is that if it's not operable, you can't use it in a mission. This really comes into play, since the missions are all time-sensitive in that they're scheduled. Specifically, you will find out about missions in advance, but then have something like three to five days to prepare for the mission. This may sound like a lot of time, but in Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire one "day" is one "turn". Any single update that you make to your Gundam will take one day to complete, and you can't use your Gundam while it's being upgraded; it's "at the shop", if you will. I've found that when it comes to upgrades, I am mainly limited by the time it takes to repair my units and then to upgrade them, rather than the cost of the upgrades being much of a factor. Buying new units takes two days for delivery, and the cost of buying new units is much higher than upgrading existing ones. While this makes perfect sense, it prevents you from simply buying a lot of units and upgrading some while the others are being repaired. I was able to keep a couple of extra units on hand, but not a great many.

As you progress, you will have more support on your missions, both ground support and support Gundams from your unit. Each mission will have a number of support Gundams that you can bring in with you, typically one or two. You can bring up to that number in with you, selecting from the active and available units in your Hangar. As you increase in Rank, you will gain the ability to give more commands to your units; when you reach high enough rank, you will also be able to command allied units.

After a few missions, you will be able to access training missions in the Mission menu. These are great, in that they allow you to gain experience when your units are out-of commission. Until these are available, you will be making heavy use of the "Next Day" menu option to progress to the next day. Once training missions are available, it is much wiser to use these missions to train your pilots and get some practice, rather than to "lose" a day.

I love Mech games. Yes I said, "Mech", not "Mecha". I like Mecha games as well, but I prefer the more realistic simulation feel, although the sword don't really bother me. I have played - and loved - the Armored Core series since I found out about it, and some of my fondest memories of the Super Nintendo were playing Mech Warrior. I say all this to define my character; I am familiar with mech games.

Even so, I found Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire to be quite difficult. At first, I didn't realize that I could use my head-mounted guns at the same time as my rifle. This got me dead. Quick. This also caused me a very great deal of frustration. After reading through the book a bit, it occurred to be that since the machine guns were head-mounted, they shouldn't be mutually exclusive of other weapons. That realization helped. A lot. I found that I was then able to actually play the game.

Unfortunately, about a third of the way through, I hit a mission that seemed impassable. The difficulty seemed to spike. My fear is that this was the effect of the "little mistakes" catching up to me. As I mention in gameplay, taking too much damage in a mission causes your units to be unavailable for upgrades for a longer amount of time. Choosing the wrong upgrades can also waste precious time. And going into a mission with your units not prepared as they should be will cause you to take more damage than you would have otherwise, creating a vicious circle; the worse you do in a mission, the worse you'll do in upgrades and the worse you'll do in your next mission. While this is probably fairly true to life, it's very frustrating to progress through a game and then realize deep into it that you made mistakes earlier on that put you in a horrible predicament that can really only be remedied by starting over. There's a good chance that you played each mission a few times to get to this point. Playing them all over again is not the most exciting proposal.

As far as which side to choose, it seemed that it was a bit less difficult to play when I played as the Federation, so I suggest waiting to play as the Zeons until you've gotten stuck in your first game. Perhaps switching back and forth between sides when your game completely stalemates will keep the game interesting for you.

When a game gets frustrating in this manner, it no longer has a "fun factor" to speak of for anyone other than the most desperate gluttons for punishment.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire lives up to its name, proving to be more "mecha" than "mech". For those who aren't avid followers of mech(a) genres, it basically comes down to the treatment of the technology. Mech and mecha both refer to machinery used for war, but shaped in a humanoid or animal-like form, typically larger than a person and with a human pilot inside, often sitting in a cockpit located in the head or chest, or worn as a suit of armor, in the case of smaller mecha. The idea behind these machines is that they are more agile than tanks, are more multi-purpose, due to their physiology. This allows for weapons that mimic human weapons, such as much larger versions of guns and swords. The idea, however, that these machines are agile enough to wield swords is primarily relegated to the "Mecha" genre. In a videogame, this is also portrayed in the controls and in the general "feel" of the game. While the controls in Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire are a bit complex, they don't approach the simulation details found in a "Mech" simulator, such as Steel Battalions.

The fact that the game is "Mecha" and not "Mech" doesn't, surprisingly, make it easy to play. The lack of any sort of useful automated camera controls increases the difficulty in even playing the game, mind you, as does some unexpected camera moving (or popping as I refer to it) that occurs when you jump onto an opponent to attack them with your sword. Luckily, the gameplay is saved a bit by over-eager collision detection. Although you're not facing your enemy when you swing your sword, you're still likely to hit them, which will buy you time to turn towards them and fix the camera before they can shoot you.

The management aspect in Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire is both an interesting concept and, possibly, its greatest downfall. Adding a gameplay element which allows a player to slowly do themselves in or to get themselves into a predicament where their saved game does them no good is a betrayal. The game developer makes money when the game is sold. This makes the player an important friend to the developer. That's the point of saved games. Saved games are a developer's way of saying, here... let me help you out... this will allow you to stop playing for a bit and return to continue the story later. Allowing the player to get themselves into such dire straights is much like allowing someone playing Tomb Raider to save their game in mid-air after they've fallen off of a cliff. My saved game does me no good, since I'm not prepared for the next mission. The only real answer is to start over, which I'm not really interested in doing. My suggestion to the player is to save multiple saved games. Save your game when you think you're doing really good. The other suggestion is to retry missions until you do really good. If you find that you're taking a lot of damage or the mission's not going the way you would like it to, pause and restart the mission - it would be better to play through the current mission a couple of times while you're here than to have to start all over later. And if you get a rating lower than an "A", then you should probably try the mission again. Mind you, this is not an option that is offered to you by the game, so you'd need to save before each mission and reload your previous game and try again. Just as a note, there is a rating higher than "A"; "S" is Superior.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire could have been a much better game with a few small improvements. Despite its beautiful graphics, I can only recommend it to complete Gundam fanatics who don't mind replaying missions and starting the game over. Anyone who is unsure of this game should invest in renting Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire before buying it. You've been warned.