Also, the concept is to have the utility of a soldier with the firepower of a tank, (and perhaps the speed of a fast attack vehicle, hence the skating).The_ModeRazor said:
Yes, I have played Mechwarrior games.
The only anime I've seen that tried to depict Mecha in a realistic, and sensible, manner is Patlabor.
The mecha in Patlabor are called "Labors" because they were designed for large scaled manual labor, like construction and such, hence the name "Labor". It actually makes sense, and is a lot better than just pulling a name like "wanzer" out of one's butt.
They can't fly or skate around. One character even has a dream about her Labor being able to fly, and is made fun of it after see tells a co-worker about it because of how ridiculous it sounds.
The police and military Labors have "big versions of existing guns," but it's for the sake of keeping the dexterous hands so that they can perform other tasks besides shooting and blowing stuff up.
In other words, the mecha of Patlabor are there for more than just sake of "the rule of cool" and have actual practical purposes.
It's one of the reasons why Patlabor is an anime I can easily recommend to people. The other reasons being that the movies are good mystery stories and the series is funny as hell.
So, yeah the creators of this game could take a few ques from Mechwarrior and Patlabor.
