Actually, if you ignore Harabec's agravating All American Hero mannerisms and bleached teeth, he's quite a nice chap. Start with the Human campaign and straight away you'll find yourself fighting alongside Rebel champ Harabec - you know, the stupid sonofabitch who triggered this whole damn rebellion thing in the first place. Many HERCs are vulnerable to attack from the rear and, if you're not careful, getting behind a line of enemy units will see your metal backside toasted with a stream of plasma. Then, before you it - BAM! - you dead at the controls. Before you get that logged into your brain, you'll find yourself bearing down on enemy units, firing at them, and then clomp-clomp-clomping straight past as if you've dropped dead at the controls. The important thing to remember, and the key to enjoying the game, is that the HERC keeps going until you tell it to stop. Mind you, if you are used to MicroProse's rival MechWarrior series, you won't be flashing the lights and honking the horn every time you go to make a right turn - the developers have thoughtfully included the keyboard layouts from both MechWarrior II: Mercenaries and Heavy Gear. You use the cursor keys to get the thing up and running in the right direction, and the mouse to control the gun turrets. For starters, although the game is played from the first-person perspective, your HERC is pretty unique in the way it's controlled. Unfortunately for you battle-ready arcade freaks, Starsiege requires perseverance. Because that's all you need to know, right?
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Push your doubts to one side, though, and get yourself straight into Training to find out how to walk and shoot at the same time. Once installed and running, you're presented with a distinctly low-resolution main menu (you know the type: lurid colours straight out of a 70s arcade cabinet and jagged edges you could cut timber with) that instils little confidence in the technology. On top of all that, it's two games for the price of one, making it extremely good value for money. Effectively, then, it's the end of the popular Earthsiege trilogy but the start of something much bigger, encompassing several storylines, innumerable missions and a huge variation of combat hardware. The history and plot are carefully explained, and you know before you even start that all the nasty pushing and shoving comes to an end in the year 2832 when spin-off title Starsiege: Tribes, bundled with the game and reviewed on page 80, takes over. The Starsiege game (effectively Earthsiege II) sees you participating in the uprising as either a Human soldier or a Cybrid, er, thing. Time for a revolt - and who better to lead it than the Emperor's right-hand man? You Up For It? Most worrying of all, his new defensive strategy is centred around Earth, leaving the Martian and Venetian colonies wide open to Cybrid attacks. Which means that his 200-year reign is becoming a bit of a bind - his demands are cruel, and his policies domineering. Only trouble is, the Emperor is a bit of a plonker. But hey, who cares? The Earth's forces have been rebuilt and fortified under the guidance of a new Emperor, and are now more than capable of withstanding another war. Better, quicker and much nastier Cybrids with side impact protection bars and magneto-fusion assault cannons were recently launched at the Jupiter Motor Show, so it's only a matter of time before they go into mass production and strike. Arch enemy of humanity Prometheus and his alien robot chums have fled to Saturn, and are busying themselves with another mechanised squadron of death. It's the distant tuture, and the the previous Earthsieges games are now a distant memory of generations long-since departed.