MechWarrior 5: Clans

I'm currently maybe 6 or so hours in on this (I know it says 7; I left it running for a bit.) Initial impression is.... it reminds me a lot of the older MechWarrior games I played in the early days of 3d; it's mech-stomping fun, but it's way grindier than I would like it to be. I understand wanting to make people unlock things, but you need so many points of this that and the other thing to just unlock a similar arm for a mech so you can fit more laser weapons, for example. I'm not looking forward to the grind that I know is ahead of me, but the game is also fun enough so far that I know I'm going to do it until I have a mech that can run as many PPCs as I want. There's also a ton of content that's locked behind DLC's, which.... it's 2026, I get it, they need to make money - I just kinda wish they wouldn't put all the things you can't play with right in front of you and tell you to bugger off anytime you try to buy one. I feel like there's a difference between making the DLC feel expansive for a base game versus hiding stuff they know you want behind a paywall, and this definitely is presented as the latter. As for how it runs... I hit hiccups and minor stutters here and there, but I think that's probably more an issue with Windows doing ♥♥♥♥ it shouldn't in the background. It's generally been running completely fine on my modest machine. ________________________________________________________ Edit:// I've now beaten the base campaign so much as I wanted to, and have essentially beaten all of the DLC content so much as I'm going to. (Hours played is a bit misleading; I've left it on a lot by accident, but it's probably around 80-100 actual hours with all the DLC's at this point.) The game is fun, and I would still recommend it, but there's a lot kinda wrong with it from a game design standpoint that makes it imperfect in a way that's actually very frustrating as a player. The way they handle mech experience is annoying, because it takes a ton of time and effort to unlock upgrades for your mechs, and it doesn't even carry over between campaigns - which maybe makes sense from a narrative standpoint, but it isn't fun for the player, and that honestly kinda sucks. I should be excited to buy a new mech, but instead I have to hit the simpod and replay missions over and over if I want to even be able to equip the damn thing, or rotate up and down - which is on its face ridiculous. The bugs and crashes other reviews mentioned I did eventually start to encounter when i bought the newest DLC (Wolves of Tukayyid), but I really had no issue with this prior to that with the base game and the other two DLC's that I played first. Occasional stuttering prior, which was annoying, but I'm guessing it's just the game being a little badly optimized. The crashing, however, was very annoying, because it would happen to me at the worst times (like 75% of the way through a mission). One time I couldn't make my mech walk at the start of a level, which was also annoying. (I tried opening and closing menus, tabbing out, etc - nothing helped, and other commands had stopped working for some reason. It was weird.) But, that all aside, there really isn't a lot of good competition in this space, so this is kinda by default one of the best recent mech games I've played ¯\_(ツ)_/¯