Despite the fact that MechWarrior 3 is very much a sim, the necessary controls are easy to learn and the quick-reference card can safely be put away after a short time at the helm. Build your own walking death-machine. The scenery is also very nice to look at, with carefully modelled houses, military complexes, and even fishing boats. The planet that the campaign takes place on is somewhat barren, so you won't see much in the way of grass or trees, but there's just enough 'terrain boogers' to make the view believable. Despite that, there are nicely textured desert, wilderness, arctic and volcanic arenas to play in.
Water is well drawn and nicely transparent, and appears in almost every campaign map.
This has significant implications when considering strategies for taking on the enemy, as I'll explain later. One of the things that really made me wince when playing MechWarrior 2 was the way static objects blew up. Despite the fact that modelling the disintegration of large objects under the influence of gravity is still essentially impossible with today's processors, Zipper have greatly improved the illusion of such events in MechWarrior 3 . The Mech models are the best I have seen in a game. Each model is animated with a realism that suggests the use of motion capture technology.