MechCommander 2

The single-player game takes place on Carver V, a planet previously held by House Liao, but recently mostly captured by the Federated Commonwealth, who killed the local Liao ruler Mandarin Cho in combat. At the beginning of the story, the Federated Commonwealth, an alliance of House Steiner and House Davion, is breaking apart due to Archon Katrina Steiner's controversial seizure of power. All the Houses on Carver V are avoiding any military action that could endanger the peace, so when a suspiciously well-equipped bandit force threatens Steiner territory, House Steiner employs a mercenary team led by the player, who takes the role of their commander.

In Campaign 1, the player is under the command of Colonel David Renard of House Steiner, and starts with relatively simple missions to destroy minor bandit forces. However, a chase of a bandit convoy results in a firefight with Liao units. It is then revealed that the bandit leader is an ex-Liao officer. Renard authorizes full-scale attacks on Liao forces despite protests from Steiner Ambassador Yee.

In 2006, Microsoft released a portion of the source code along with most game assets (i.e. everything needed to compile the game without networking support and without all the art) under a Shared Source license in order to demonstrate its XNA Build system. The source release documentation warns developers that not all code necessary to produce a complete build has been included:

Source files are not provided for all of the output files from the MechCommander 2 build. For these output files, the built file itself exists in the source folder and is simply copied from there to the FinalBuild folder. Be careful not to delete .fst or .pak files that exist in the source directory at the time of installation because you will not be able to rebuild these.

The game received "favorable" reviews according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. John Lee of NextGen called it "An eminently playable, thoroughly engrossing game that's very close to its roots."