MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries

Is the MW5 base game good? No. Is MW5 with all DLC good? It's just okay. Is MW5 with all DLC and YAML good? Emphatically yes! MW5 is a very strange experience. The game itself is just scraping by. It has awful voice overs. It has a lame and poorly written plot for the main questline. The new style mechs are bulbous and ugly. The AI is sufficient, but by no means anything challenging. The missions are repetitive. The graphics are solid, but nothing extraordinary. The game is not meaningfully different than other similar mech games since MW2 and lacks the charm and atmosphere that memorable game had in 1990s. As a base game experience, MW5 feels like the developers were hampered by limited resources and 'play it safe' committee thinking. What emerges is a rather bland offering, not very good nor truly awful. The base game is a weak product duct taped together by a recognizable IP. It is mehwarrior 5. The DLCs add a lot of new mission types and factions. The DLCs do a lot of work, but still suffer from the fundamental weaknesses of the base game. There is some flavor there now. There are even some hints at good writing and interesting new mechanics. Some real talent and creativity shines through. It is better, but not great. Mods completely change the picture. YAML and associated mods transform the game from a forgettable, albeit not unpleasant, stompy robot game into a exciting and tense vision of armored combat in the 31st century. The weapons are powerful. The AI is competent and often deadly. The setting is weird and fun with many new maps and mechs to play with. Players can go in to modify and change their mechs in detail. Players can now also tailor the difficulty to suit their own playstyle and game experience. The modders double down on Battletech's mad setting and embrace its complexity for the player's benefit. They made something 'meh' into something truly compelling that hits all the high notes of the tabletop and reimagines them in true fps form. 10/10 (buy the DLCs and install YAML)

Look, I don't care about "The Lore" or "accuracy to the tabletop game" (I've played the Tabletop version since 1984). This is just an awesome Giant Stompy Robot Fighting Game.

If you're looking for a mech game in which you not only pilot a mech but run and financially manage your own mercenary group, negotiate contracts, hire and develop pilots(and see them killed in action), gain favor with different factions(or piss them off) and fine tune big ass mechs on a big ass star map, then this is the game for you. Right away, the biggest draw back is that it can become a bit monotonous, but not because for a lack of mission types or content, but rather because the game is SO big. Its one of those games where you can sit down for an hour and basically just manage and shift things around, before starting to actually play a mission. Or do two-three smaller missions just to properly prepare for one bigger mission. It can also be a bit overwhelming if you're not familiar with the Battletech universe and how things work. In which case you'll find yourself alt-tabbing a lot asking google for the reason why you cannot put X on Y and so on. The game has a revenge story framework, but for the most part leaves you completely alone doing what you wanna do. You're not even forced to do a story mission when you unlock it but instead you can keep doing your thing if you want. The story isn't bad but its obviously not the focus here. The campaign/gear progression is great. The devs managed a good curve here, especially for players who aren't familiar with BT and would otherwise not know where to go first or which mechs to go for. Mech customization and maintenance is great and goes even deeper with mods. The game also has custom difficulty options making you able to adjust pretty much every single aspect of the game to your liking, if you want to. One advice I'd give you is to use the FPS style controls, unless you plan on playing this with a joystick or HOTAS. As the classic control scheme is tailored for that kind of setup. How much you like this also depends on how much you're into Battletech lore, or how much you want to be into it. The newsticker is covering pretty much all bases of historical events as you play through the game. But if you don't care for reading all that, it'll do nothing for you. Just note that there's a LOT more lore to read in this game than you'll think. The negatives are as said the monotony of it, as well as the AI being very basic. [b]A short thing on DLC:[/b] they all add things to the sandbox campaign and they're pretty much all worth taking at this point. Mixed reviews at the time of release mostly relate to relatively little or underbaked content for the price. But in retrospect and being able to grab DLC on sales, again, it's all worth it as it only makes the game better. 2 DLC that are considered to be pretty much mandatory are Heroes of the Inner Sphere and Shadow of Kerensky. The former adding a lot for the base campaign experience and adding career mode, and the latter expanding the timeline to include the Clan Invasion. Without it you won't encounter clans or clan mechs at all. Legends of the Kestrel Lancers, Dragon's Gambit, and Rise of Rasalhague all add mechs, mission types, missions and their respective DLC campaigns. Solaris Showdown focuses on Arena battles, which is a nice addition to the campaign play and breaks up the monotony of it. Call to Arms is probably the weakest, as it adds melee weapons and chassis, that almost nobody really uses, but still worth taking for the biomes. Chaos Reign is the latest one and expands the Clan Invasion with a tie-in campaign to the old cartoon series. Definitely one you can wait to get. On a final note I gotta say that the game has an outstanding modding community, especially if you're into Battletech in general, and the mods for this game make this the ultimate Mechwarrior experience to date. The most popular ones, like YAML, deeply enhancing Mech management, and add deep customization options. One mod I'd recommend using right away, even if you prefer going vanilla, is "UltraVisualandWeatherV3", which greatly enhances the lighting and visuals of the game without much of a performance impact. If you're in any way interested in Battletech/Mechwarrior, you probably played this already. And if you're in any way interested in big sandbox games or Mechs, you definitely should.

Would definitely recommend this with a minor caveat or two. Tl;dr: I think it's the best game in the franchise that I've personally played since MW2 (not that I've played everything since then but at least a few titles, 3, 4, Battletech, clans, MWO). It runs fairly well, it has good immersion and lore if that appeals to you, it has a lot of variety of mechs/gear and the option to add lots more content with modding. Co-op is good but can be a little finnicky in some ways. Good soundtracks, the visuals are quite nice and immersive (and can be improved with modding) - it definitely fits the setting but it's not going to be quite as pretty as some newer titles. The storyline was fine, there's definitely a reasonable number of cutscenes and there's a lot of lore to draw from in the Battletech universe - some of the DLCs don't play nicely retroactively (as in they try and adhere to specific starting points and if you install one late in a playthrough you can miss out) but you can also opt to skip them or do later starts in the timescale (possibly more options with modding). For context, I've almost exclusively played the career mode over storyline and the majority of my time has been spent with modded content doing a mixture of solo and multiplayer. I greatly appreciate the more sandbox approach over the more linear story-driven style of MW5 Clans (while that's been okay the customisation was heavily limited in comparison). At this point I will stress that modding adds a LOT of longevity to the game, both in terms of raw content (mission types, mechs, pilot customisation, equipment etc.) but also replayability and customising difficulty. It's worth noting that there's a pretty solid modding community who (as of writing this) have been doing a great job of keeping a lot of the major QoL/mods I use updated. As for caveat: the game was not designed around proper multiplayer integration, if you don't use mods to assist with this, you're essentially along for the ride in someone else's playthrough in regards to decision-making and some agency, you can still customise mechs and buy items and the actual playing missions works fine but there's definitely some obvious limitations. In this regard you are somewhat at the mercy of the mod(s) to alleviate this being updated for any current DLCs or issues that may arise, this is somewhat par for the course with most modded experiences, though. I have also had the occasional issue with trying to have people join specific save files/modded content and then needing to diagnose why things don't work well for the client or they can't load in properly. This may be mostly tied to modding and load-order/mismatch issues as I don't recall any issues with unmodded co-op but that can leave some things to be desired. Probably rate it a solid 8-8.5/10 and I'll happily keep putting more hours into it.

This is by far the best modern Mechwarrior game. There is just so much content that they have added over the years and it really is just an all around fantastic game. There really isn't anything else like this on the market if you are into a mech game that plays less like an action combat game and more like a slow, tactical vehicle combat game. I really recommend the game and all of its DLCs.

The shooting, movement, customization, graphics, story and writing are all cool, but the A.I. enemies (which is all you'll fight in this game) are terribly lame. I can't count the amount of times I had to run 1000km away to kill a tank driving in a circle behind a mountain in the distance to trigger the next part of a mission. I don't understand how this was overlooked in playtesting, it's terrible.

At first the game introduces you to the classical battletech revenge storyline. Your dad dies in combat while protecting you and the rest of the unit. Which is you, your mech and a Leopard dropship. However such a small unit was able to pay for their own dropship evades me. You, your small crew and a few pilots you hire along the way, are going up against a mysterious and almost incincible mercenary force that no one seems to know about yet they field lots and lots of dropships and apparently whole regiments of mechs and other assault vehicles. After the introduction most of the game is repetitive mission after repetitive mission. The same missions, the same map pieces, over and over again. From time to time, after a heavy grind for better mechs and equipment, you can try to do the next storyline mission. But those are too few to mention. In game time they are about 5 % or less of the overall experience. The other 95 % are the repetitive missions mentioned above. And as my review is getting as repetitive as the game itself I will end it here. Only buy this if you really really love doing the same thing over and over again.

It has been many years and many DLCs since this game released and the A.I. is still extremely poor and frustrating. The most common reason to leave a session should not be due to frustration with the game's programming. For example, the second an arena battle starts the opposing force runs to the opposite corner of the map and hides, forcing you to spend the entire match walking there (so boring) and then facing a literal pile of mechs all at once.