MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries

I really wanted to like this game, I really did. I've played every previous MechWarrior game, including playing MechWarrior Online since its launch. I was feeling the urge to play a new single player MW, rather than the constant online brawl, so I decided to give this game a try. Disappointment doesn't even begin to describe the result. To get it out of the way, not every aspect of the game is bad. The graphics are pretty good, and the mechs handle beautifully. The moment to moment gameplay is actually a ton of fun. It's all the elements surrounding that wonderful moment to moment gameplay where the game falls down. There are numerous minor issues, and TONs of bugs and crash issues, but the biggest problems - the ones the community has known about for years and PGI still hasn't fixed, are as follows: The AI is a potato. Both friendly and enemy AIs are the stupidest AIs in a video game I have ever seen. A prime example of this is that all AI, friendly and enemy, will regularly walk through objects they were supposed to be protecting, instantly destroying them. Additionally, If you give your lancemates jumpjets, they sometimes jump up on buildings and forget how to get back down, staying up there the rest of the mission unless you shoot the building out from under them (I stopped giving my lancemates jumpjets). Worse than the AI is the difficulty. The galaxy "scales" as you level up, and can eventually become almost impossible. Some mission types have infinitely respawning enemies, which can (and have) spawned literally on top of me already shooting me in the back while I'm trying to focus on the objective. After killing the fourth lance of assault and heavy mechs in a row with my lance of heavies we were all nearly dead and couldn't finish the mission, even with multiple retries. And the better you do, the more they spawn. MODs can fix some of these issues, but I don't like mods, and they shouldn't have to. As it stands I advise strongly against buying.

So i tried to run this game last year on the EGS, but even when I had my 5800 xt, it bogged down hard. I could barely pull enough frames to be runnable at a spot I like. So I refunded. Didn't think I would touch the game again, that is until they released the Heroes of the Inner Sphere, and it rolled onto GOG. The game runs way better now. I can run at 2k resolution with all maxed out settings at 60fps, so a definite improvement. The game is awesome through and through. Managing your merc company reminds me of doing so in Battletech, and the combat feels great. The mechs are varied as one would expect and there are ones that I wouldn't use in all situations. The only part I don't like is the intro to the campaign. It feels a little weak, and the voice acting kind of blows. But I'm not really here for the story, or the voice actors, moreso just to battle with big ass mechs. Definetly check it out. I think it's worth the time and money, and can see myself sinking many hours into this.

Pros: The DLC adds lots of authored missions which really reflect the political infighting of the battletech universe. While the MWO assets took a visual direction that a lot of us classic battletech fan boys aren't particularly fond of, they still look truly great in their own way. Full innerspher playground. Lots of mechs and weapons to us, especially with DLC. It's still fun, albeit frustrating. See Cons. Cons: More primitive AI than Doom 1. Really, the AI is truly awful, and not optimized in the least. I'm actually impressed that such a small logic tree has such a huge cpu load. The AI will almost always prioritize players over any other threat, meanwhile friendly AI will spend their time just shooting the player in the back or always moving to be directly in front of the player so you can't shoot back. DLC 2 broke the raytracing engine, they still haven't fixed it. Single-digit FPS with a 3060ti the second raytracing is turned on. Poorly implemented outsourced audio engine. No sense of scale. Enemies can be actively shooting you in the back and you just never know unless you're looking at your damage indicators. Thankfully fixed by mods. CPU heavy and poorly implemented spawns, constantly checking individual spawns rather than only checking when necessary, no exclusion areas around the player or defense targets resulting in spawns directly behind the player, around corners directly in front of player, directly under player's crosshairs, or inside defense targets. SO many shortcuts taken during development. In conclusion; it's a mechwarrior game. We bought it because we love mechwarrior. It's a decent mechwarrior game... But you'd think Epic throwing AAA money at PGI would have resulted in a better game than this. MW2, MW2M, MW3, and even MW4 were all vastly better games than this. Get it on sale.

Maybe if you are coming from MWO this might be the game for you but I found this game immensly frustrating for what it is. Engagement ranges are too short, zoom is pointless early on, never got far enouugh to see if that imporves. Radar may as well not exist, enemies rush close to engage which would be fine if you could find people on the radar. There is no ability to snipe targets which means long range weapons are pointless. The pop up turrets appear practiacally next to you so there is no planing for them. Defence missions are a waste of time since the enemy will just rush into the defense location and run around breaking everything so you are force to take a mech into the base you are defending to kill the attacker. The endless waves at the end are okay to a point as it helps to get money and materials but there are planetry defences that have less then what they were throwing at the lance. For me this felt like a complicated FPS, locational armour and damage that can hurt my character, but there was no impact from the weapons, no ability to engage and target enemies at reasonable ranges. Every battle felt the same, take a few shots at range, maybe waste the LRM's and achieve nothing if the target was moving, and then brawl with everyone because you aren't going to hit them otherwise. Overall I came here wanting to play a stompy tank game and ended up playing an unimpressive FPS. Looked alright through and worked better then MWO, so there is that.

The Mechwarrior 5 base game is pretty average. The DLC add needed polish and flavour. The Mods make this game excellent! I had never technical difficulties, modding is rather easy - grab them from Nexusmod, unzip them and put them into the Mod folder, mark them as active and conflicting mods get a yellow conflict sign so oyu can chose what mods be acive and what not. Merctech, Piratetech, Pilot Overhaul, vonBiomes, TTrulez_AI etc. giv you a world of mods to play with that change the gameplay, add biomes, add vehicles and equiment, give your pilots more flavor etc. At this point especially if the bas game is on sale you can not do anything wrong! And the best is friends need only the base game to play in Coop Mission with the host and all DLCs the host owns can be played coop by them even if they dont have them. MW5 has become a better game and is still improving!