‘Front Mission 3: Remake' Switch Review: Wanzers On A Budget

Forbes

2 days ago

'Front Mission 3: Remake' has had a substantial makeover compared to the original PlayStation game.
Originally, the first Front Mission game to come Westward, this remake of Front Mission 3 has a lot to live up to.
If you're not unfamiliar with the Front Mission games, these are tactical role-playing games where you control 4-5 meter tall mecha called wanzers.
Each map is grid-based and has a large variety of locales and enemies you face, from tanks to helicopters, and of course, enemy wanzers.
Despite the fact that the name for mecha in this setting is the obviously comical wanzer, its influences are very clearly from mecha anime such as Armored Trooper VOTOMS.
Like the ATs in that anime, the wanzers can also zoom along the ground at high speeds and are roughly the same height.
Your wanzer customization options are extensive.
The big difference with wanzers is that you can customize their bodies as well as their weapon loadouts, which is closer to the setup in Armored Core, although arguably Front Mission got there first.
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In this iteration of Front Mission series, you can also target the pilot and force them to eject and surrender. It's a neat little thing, and naturally, your own pilots can jump out of their wanzers, too.
The only oddity with specificity in targeting is that you can't target specific limbs in this game. It seems like a very obvious omission and would actually be very useful in combat from a strategic standpoint.
Instead, we are left with a random chance of what limbs will be attacked, which can be a tad frustrating.
As for this remake, from a visual standpoint, it's not bad. The game is using Unity, which is arguably better suited for 2D games, but the wanzers and the environments here look good in their updated form.
Some of the game's 2D art appears to be AI-generated.
However, it seems that a chunk of the 2D art has been AI-generated or modified by AI in some way. This feels like a budgetary constraint more than anything else, but it does make the game feel cheap in places.
Which brings me to my main point: this game feels like it was done on too tight a budget. Not only in a visual sense, with the use of AI-generated art, but also some of the obvious quality-of-life features, such as targeting of specific limbs, that could have been added in if the team had had more time.
The other thing here, and this is more of a criticism of the developer when it comes to their library of remakes, is that they are in many ways too faithful to the host material without thinking of what modern gamers would expect.
If this were a straight-up retro port of the original game, of which many exist, that would be fine. However, this is meant as a remake, and that means taking into account the games that were released after the original game and potentially implementing functional features that modern gamers would naturally expect to be there.
Overall, Front Mission 3: Remake is a solid update to a classic mecha tactical role-playing game from the PlayStation era. It does feel rushed in places, and here's hoping the game receives some patches to fix some of those issues, much like the previous remakes in the series have.
Front Mission 3: Remake
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Developer: MegaPixel
Publisher: Square Enix, Forever Entertainment
Released: 26th June 2025
Price: $34.99
Score: 7/10
Disclosure: Forever Entertainment sent me a copy of this game for the purposes of this review.
Follow me on X, Facebook and YouTube. I also manage Mecha Damashii and am currently featured in the Giant Robots exhibition currently touring Japan.