TL;DR? A tedious, frustrating experience that is a massive regression from MW5:M.
Where do I even start with this? Every part is a mess in one way or another.
To get this out of the way first: you're playing as the worst clan. Not a big selling point. Moving on...
All of the characters are premade. From their personalities to their piloting bonuses that you level up, you cannot customize your characters in any way. All you can do is increase the already selected bonuses. Yes, that means you cannot customize your main guy to your style of play. Oh, but allegedly you can play as [i]any[/i] of your teammates on any mission. However, every time I tried it, I encountered some kind of bug that would allow me to walk forward and backward, but not turn, rendering the "play as any of your teammates" more hypothetical than real. Weird.
While I'm on the topic of your teammates, let's talk about their AI. As I'm sure you've read in other reviews, they're terrible. Inexcusably awful. If I could, I would have all of them court martialed for cowardice in front of the enemy. You can order (and believe me, I'll get to that) your teammates to attack a target, and they just... won't. They'll just stand around. If you happen to be in a narrow pass, and they're lined up behind you, they'll just stand there, even if there's room to go around you. If you're firing on an enemy, they will wander into your firing line, providing cover to the enemy. That this game is sold as if it's playable as a single player game is a gnat's whisker away from being a lie. The team AI is so bad, you'd be better off playing this solely as a multiplayer game. Your AI team is not there to help you. If you want competent team members, recruit your real life friends... and hope none of their games crash mid-mission.
Speaking of helping: orders. There may as well not be a way to direct your team for how little there is to work with. You cannot set formations. You cannot order your team to patrol. You cannot set standing orders like "attack nearest enemy" or "focus on [x]-type mechs" or "draw fire" or anything. Not that any of that would help anyway, since they generally just disregard orders anyway. The order wheel itself is finnicky. You can't use it AT ALL in scan mode, and it will sometimes close itself as you're trying to give specific orders. No idea why! It makes it a frustrating system to use in the heat of battle.
On the topic of battles, as others have mentioned, a lot of these fights just drag on way too long. Often, you will reach the point where you think, "OK, surely, that was the last of the reinforcements," only for 2-3 more waves to pour in. It makes every fight feel like a meat grinder. You never finish a fight feeling like you accomplished anything because you're limping back to base after every mission. Thankfully, unlike MW5M, you don't pay for the repairs yourself. If I were to guess why every fight is made to be this way, I would suggest it's because the devs ran out of ideas on what to do on each mission, and with an incompetent AI, their options for mission diversity were down to... scan some things... then fight wave after wave of enemies until mission complete. It's SUPER tedious.
Let me give you an example of tediousness. There are at least three missions in this game centered around fighting the outside turrets on Union-class drop ships. [i]AT LEAST[/i] three. One of these missions, you're tasked with finding a lost star from another unit. How does that translate into what you do on the mission? You scan some things, then fight waves of enemies. Scan some things, then fight waves of enemies. Then you fight the turrets of the Union-class drop ship as you also fight some assault and heavy mechs. To really tie everything together, on one of my playthroughs of this mission, I would order my teammates to attack specific cannons on the ship. They would ignore my orders and just shoot the ship itself while being wrecked by the ship's cannons. One of my teammates was stuck in a loop of trying to shoot [i]through[/i] the ship while repeatedly entering and exiting one of the loading ramps. Absolutely useless. I could not get him to do anything else as the specific kinds of orders you can give are so limited.
So what's a good way to make things less tedious? How about min/maxing your character growth to wipe the floor with your enemies? Y'know, make your own fun! Not happening. You will constantly be butting your head against the tonnage limit per mission. Added to that, the mechs available to you are bafflingly limited throughout the game. You'd think a military force would want to outfit their assault forces with the best of the best equipment possible, yet early on, you're stuck with the lightest mechs possible, praying you're not put up against a jumpscare Atlas or Awesome. It would have been cooler to have mission-specific stars, but that would require mission complexity and... well...
By the end of the game, you [i]will[/i] have enough resources to outfit your team with all Dire Wolfs, but by that point, you're also getting fed into the worst of the worst the game can throw at you, meat-grinder-wise. You, at no point, feel like you've ever become powerful or accomplished.
Maybe I just suck at this game... I don't think I'm [i]that[/i] bad at video games... but there's just no fun to be found here. Even the endings are downers, if you know anything about the lore. No matter what you choose, your characters basically have no future. This game feels... nihilistic.
Additional notes:
1. This game crashes. Some missions can take half an hour to complete. There are no mid-mission checkpoints. Do with that information what you will.
2. For whatever reason*, the game lists all the DLC mechs in your in game mech dealership. These mechs are only available if you own the DLC, but they're listed alongside the base game mechs as if you could unlock them at the same time as the base game mechs. You cannot. You need the DLC. So you have to navigate around them constantly.
3. Forgot this bit: the UI when you're on missions is [i]atrocious.[/i] You know those COD memes that have icons and boxes and all kinds of crap strewn all over the screen? That's this game. What happened to the simple layout of MW5M? This is worse of a downgrade than Deus Ex's UI to Deus Ex: Invisible War's UI. Your reticle, instead of being a simple crosshair, is this massive embellished eyesore. You constantly have people yakking in your ear, with accompanying "video feeds" of the person speaking (with the worst lip flaps I've ever seen) AND all of their message typed out... so you have TWO boxes taking up the center of your screen for the entire time they're yapping, in addition to all the clutter that's always there. Awful.
*The reason is to get you to buy the DLC.
