MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries

Firstly - the good points: The game is solid and very playable with good world physics and the visuals are very good, almost everything can be blown up. As an introduction to the world of MechWarrior or as an update to MW4 Mercs this is great. As a stand alone game its good - go into it with an open mind, and learn how everything works before you decide to hate it, it's not as straight forward as call of duty to play as you have weapon heat, armor on all different areas of the battle mech so you can have your arms or legs blown off, weapon ranges and so on. Its very involved in the mech lab, (here you build your robot, put guns on it, add heat sinks to lose heat or add jump jets, set how much armor you think will be enough and assign weapon groups) and hope that you have made the big stompy robot better. As you progress, the mechs get bigger, the guns get bigger, the levels get harder. The Critical Points - Sorry: If you were looking forward to an updated and fresh version of MechWarrior Online then this is not the game for you, it is player vs environment and bots mostly. You can get up to 4 friends to play with you in CO-OP mode only, (no PVP). If your looking for multiplayer MWO is a far better game with a lot more mechs. The levels feel repetitive fairly rapidly as there are only a few game modes, (warzone, assault, defend a base and assassination are basically it, all consist of kill the bad guys) and the mech selection is lacking, (yes I know it's during the pre clan war era) and does not really have that multiplayer aspect that we all loved in MWO. Summary: Give this game a real multiplayer PVP and clan addon pack and make it the game it was destined to be please. This game is worth playing and paying for - its good and comes with a free mod kit on EPIC. If you want to dip your toe in the MechWarrior pond, download MWO from steam, its free and will give you one hell of a lot of hours of gaming.

I played this game free on Game Pass and still feel like I wasted my money. Long time fans of the series exposed to this game will feel an overwhelming sense of nostalgia (for the older titles). Newer players, wont be converted into fans. Fans of PGI's Mechwarrior: Online will wonder why the singleplayer practice mode they use to test loadouts has better enemy AI than this

I played this game free on Game Pass and still feel like I wasted my money. Long time fans of the series exposed to this game will feel an overwhelming sense of nostalgia (for the older titles). Newer players, wont be converted into fans. Fans of PGI's Mechwarrior: Online will wonder why the singleplayer practice mode they use to test loadouts has better enemy AI than this premium priced title does. The story is as contrived as it could possibly be; you have a father who you spend 15 minutes of time learning how to master mech controls from before he is predictably killed off. The game expects you to care about him, but the voice acting doesn't convey that at all. The main bad guy sounds like he moonlights as Cobra Commander. You spend the next several hours building your reputation up through randomly generated missions and contracts until you tick enough boxes for the next story mission. Gameplay wise, there is a bit of an unconventional difficulty curve. Depending on the mission, the more AI you bring along, the harder the mission becomes. This is due to the friendly AI's complete disregard for pesky things like defend objectives, civilian targets, and personal safety. Enemy AI is somehow worse, as they spawn out of thin air right next to you and target you before you can possibly react. This is thanks to the sensors on the mech only displaying threats you could otherwise see with your eyes; no doubt an attempt to make the enemy spawning less obvious. The graphics in this game wouldn't look out of place in a 2010 title. The only feature this game has that a previous title in the series didn't have, is the dropship. The dropship's only purpose is to spoon feed you exposition that could better be conveyed through text, and making it inconvenient to quickly access the useful screens like your mechlab and contract screen. The cooperative mode feels as tacked on as everything else in the game, when it works. Server issues often bring the experience to a grinding halt, and encourage hosts to save frequently. To summarize, PGI has mistreated the MechWarrior IP, abused the trust of long time fans of the series, and released a bland title light on content and lacking features previous entries had. MechWarrior 5: My antivirus says its not malware but I'm still not certain.

Attention: This review refers to the vanilla version of the game. With mods it´s much more playable but still far from being very good. This game is a slap in the face for all Mechwarrior Fans. Even the nearly 20 years old MW3 and MW4 are more fun than this piece of ****. Just a few Things which really annoyed me: -Extreme poor enemy spawn System. Enemies just spawn out of nowhere in overwhelming numbers when you reach certain triggers and get magnetically attracted to your position. -Useless Sensor System. The Sensor just work in your line of sight and even there you can look far wider with your eyes than with the sensors -Poor Mech customisation -Poor Lance AI. The only Thing they are perfect in is Blocking your line of fire. -unnecessary Mech Hanger. I mean, all what you do is running between the Hangar and the Bridge. For what? There is Nothing to do there. You spend your time in the menu anyway. -Very poor depiction of the timeline. If you are not familiar with the Battletech Universe, you notice that the Map and the factions are changing over the Course of time. But you do ot get any Explanation why. Events like the disovery of the Helm Memory Core, the fourth succession war, the war of 3039 or anything like that are not even mentioned in anyway. -Poor Endgame. Lots of the high difficulty contracts do not pay of well as you have immense repair Costs. So you have to pay > 1 Million for repairs, have a very Long outtime and your running Costs which leaves you with barely a Profit. -Poor Story missions. Most of the "Campaign" Missions feel exactly like the random generated missions. -Grinding. Mostly you Play the random generated missions over and over again, which means "Go to Waypoint X and destroy everything" -randomly generated Maps. This developers claim that every map is unique, but they still look all the same and as you are just walking from one waypoint to another, it does not matter -You get introduced to mech repair bays in the tutorial, but won´t find a single repair bay throughout the whole game, except the last mission. -The campaign is a grindfeast -Poor Story. The Story starts as an sub-average "I will avenge my father´s death" and keeps that low Level over the most time of the game. I don´t remember anything of the Story because the Campaign missions were nearly the same as the random generated missions. Towards the end it gets a Little better just to make a crash landing after the last Mission. I know that PGI is not a AAA-Studio, but seriously, this could have been done much better. It has some potential, but at this state it feels like a beta test.