I have held of on this review for a while because of how long I've had the game, and don't let that 602 hours fool you, this is my most played game by far as most of it came from before the steam version was available and I've been playing off and on since the latter part of the closed beta. I am a legendary founder from 2012 with at least one mech of every chassis in this game (though nowhere near every variant), excluding any new ones from the last couple months. This is mostly aimed at people who don't know the series and is more a stream of consciousness than anything else.
Mechwarrior Online is a live service hellscape combined with some of the worst, most head scratching design choices in the history of video games masking one of the best experiences you can have in video games. Everything that happens in the menus outside of the mechlab is terrible and the first user experience here is a nightmare. From there, the moment you start actually playing the game, you are hit with ghost heat and the lack of melee and the game careens downhill. And on top of all of that, it has tank controls, which I'm sure most of you hate. It's a really, REALLY rough start, and has been for more than a decade.
Stick with it though. The community here is incredible and once you get past the bad choices of a couple prior devs punishing you for making mathematically optimal builds by implementing a system with almost no user notification beyond "LOOK IT UP AND GIT GUD", the rest of the game is a masterpiece. This is what mech combat is supposed to be, and the mechlab in this game is the best in the series, or any mech game for that matter. You have a level of control over your mech's performance vastly exceeding any tuner racing game in existence, and because of those tank controls (which have been a thing in mechwarrior going back to the first game), it's WAY easier to hit your opponents than it would be otherwise because you can reliably predict where they are going. This is a cerebral game with a tiny bit of muscle memory instead of the other way around.
MWO is worth the BS. It's the pinnacle of the genre right now outside of Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries and maybe Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries or Mechwarrior 5 Clans. If the multiplayer aspect is intimidating, go play those games first. Mechwarrior 5 is a mess of it's own and also fantastic.
Final Score is 9/10, but could easily be 9.9 out of 10 if the devs got out of their own way.
P.S. One piece of advice. In the early going, grind to your first mech and then look up a build, earn it, and play that one mech for a while before trying to buy more. The money trap in MWO is the way you erode C-Bills tinkering with builds, so learn the basics before you start to try to make your own setup.
