MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries

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.

Pros: - Boom boom dakka dakka - Some lore, interesting new universe for me. - Funny jokes. A far cry for Duncan Fisher, who is "late to rise for the occasion", hehe. - Cool graphics. Adequate sound effects. - Addictive gameplay. Boom, and 4 hours have passed. Cons: - Bad video cutscenes quality, even in the latest DLC that released just this month? I'm not asking for 4k ultra clear 500gb vids, but hey guys, your videos are not even going fullscreen on ultrawide monitor, feel like 480p Youtube when internet is slow, and the 32 or 64bit/s bitrate for the audio is VERY noticeable. It is ok to make high quality renders of your videos in 2026, I assure you. And this is painful to watch, even though acting is alright. - Stutters when spawning enemies. - Enemies are not on the map from the get-go, they spawn when you reach the trigger point. Not like it is in videos about Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries that I've seen. Feels a bit unfair tbh. I would like to be able to snipe them across half the map if I have good enough render distance and fitting setup with gausses or autocannons. Long range is kinda useless when there are no enemies around and you HAVE to get closer than 800m for them to spawn, and swarm you in close distance fight. - Enemies spawn right before your eyes sometimes. You zoom in, no enemies in the compound, you walk a bit closer, BLIP, three mechs materialize out of thin air right as you watch them do it. Breaks immersion and is unfair. If you want to spawn-in someone - make them drop from a dropship, not like this. - Stupid ally AI in vanilla. Gets fixed by using TTRulez AI Mod. Still sometimes a bit stupid but gets way better. - Low music variety. Music feels too generic, although there are some cool tracks. Overall I recommend, a nice game to pass multiple evenings or even hang out in there for a longer time. Plays good with friends in co-op. But it would be cool to fix up some of the cons I highlighted, it would be a true gem then I guess.

Ai is constantly bugging out whether that means that they stand still and dont do anything or cant even pathfind to the most basic of places.

Best way to treat this game as sold is as sort of a Lego basic set - Use the base game to learn the ins and outs and then mod it particularly with YAML as it opens up the possibilities. The campaign is okay but really nothing to write how about but the real heart of the game (IMHO ) is the career part (especially with a few mods) as you can tinker around to your hearts content. Want to dip in and just fill up a quarter of an hour - you can , want to build up your team from just having a few run down mechs to an elite fighting force - you can. Don't expect flashy state of the art graphic or an enthralling storyline with this game (clans is probably better for that ) but if you want a game that is just fun with Stomp Robots - I highly recommend

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.

Incredibly bland, voice acting so bad it departs from comedy and just deals psychic damage to the player, total absence of QOL, dumbed down to the point of not really being a MW title. And like a proper Bethesda game: The modders will fix it! Really, without mods this game wouldnt have a leg to stand on. Step it up Russ.

Severely lacking polish ... 5 years after release. get this game if you genuinely *need* to play a mech game. I desperately want to like this game but it's just annoying to play. Between crashes or bugs or softlocks or the painfully stupid AI... I want to be the one in my squad piloting the heavy duty, badass mech but I can't because my teammates will practically explode if I don't hand over the big guns to them. Your squadmates don't meaningfully back you up autonomously they pretty much just follow you around (you can't change the formation). there's a similar dynamic to how GTA Online corners the "drive around and be a criminal online" gameplay loop and there's not a lot of games that can do better OR how the elder scrolls games corner the "pretend to be an adventurer in a sort of sandboxy way" gameplay loop and once again there's not a lot of games that do it better-- this game corners the mech-as-a-tank gameplay loop in the gaming market and there's unfortunately not a lot of games that do it better right now. However, I heard Drop Command might give MW5 a run for its money. There's more i could say about this game but is it really worth the effort..?

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.

You used to be able to modify your mech the way you like it. This one forces your slots for your weapons where they want you to put it making your mech really crappy. Instead of balancing the game, They reduced how good your mechs are. Mech Warrior 2, 3 and 4 were all better than this. If you wanted you could put a full missile load out, or you could put all lasers, or just AC 10s and ammo. They could have set it up like that for smart users to set their mechs up, but these days they have to dumb everything down for all the dumb people who can't figure out how to set things up. So the rest of us just have to put up with dumb down lame games. I don't know, maybe if your newer to Mech Warrior and you're not on an old hand like myself, you might like it fine, but with them locking in your modifications to your Mech Just rips the fun right out of it for me. Not to mention there's some weird things going on with the graphics and they look like crap. I don't know where that's coming from, but I have an ASUS nVidia 1080TI. The graphics should be looking really good.