MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries

The patch and DLC fixes a lot of its issues. Single player campaign and career mode can both be a bit of a slog. Basic gameplay is pretty good and meaty, game balance is reasonably good in terms of what weapons do what. Most 'mech chassis have strengths and weaknesses, but drop weight limitations means early on you mostly want 'mechs that are very ton-to-gun efficient. AI is improved, but still unpredictable and stupid. Examples; Enemy Griffin has long-range weapons and does poorly up close. Even Veteran and Elite AI run into your face and hopelessly sputter away, doing practically nothing to you. Enemy Charger has short-range weapons and can do nothing at range. Because it is in some form of "defensive mode" it refuses to leave the boundaries of its designated spot, and is thus easy to pick off at range. This becomes more frustrating when you realize it applies to your team as well. Campaign is a joke with a pathetic excuse for a narrative. Career mode is a bit better and recommended over the former, in part due to skipping the poor story. Co-op and crossplatform play works surprisingly well and is probably the best part of the entire game, Recommended if you have friends with lots of time to waste. Graphics are ok. Not really outstanding, but serviceable. Has most of the options you'd expect, and supports ultrawide. Sounds are pretty good, and improved with the re-release. Music is... fine, it's generic and some people hate it, in my opinion it is okay if you just turn it down a little bit. Various forms of controller support are not well-supported, including joysticks. M+KB works fine for me. Some QOL fixes to AI and UI would go a long way. Overall very barebones, but a lot better than it was at launch. I think it's more of a 3.5/5 but will charitably give it a 4/5 rating for the things it does right, in particular the co-op features and crossplatform.

My experience has been from the PC, Xbox app version. I'm a huge MechWarrior fan. Played them all on PC. Mech Assault 2 was the most recent official entity in 2004 so it's been a long time coming for a follow up in the Battletech universe. The best way I can describe this game is low effort/no effort product. Combat - The meat of the game. It's terrible. There is no reaction when you are taking hits. Always huge numbers of turrets, vehicles, and helicopters shooting at you from all over. Most of the time it just sounds like gun fire flying overhead and near misses, no audible feedback of gunfire banging against your mech or frying you when taking damage. No voice over reports of equipment, bland health indicators. I often find myself dead by surprise. AI - Frustrating in every way. There is a lot of smoke and dust from weapons fire in this game, which the AI has no problem shooting through. It is extremely hard to spot the small vehicles and turrets if they aren't shooting at you when there is nothing obstructing your vision. Running at full speed is one of your best options because it will magically make the AI miss their shots, and when you are still they rarely miss which will quickly shave your health. Friendly AI is a nightmare. Their strategy is to charge nearby enemies, leave you behind, get destroyed, and stick you will a fat repair bill. They also like to walk in front of you when in formation and idle. Levels - Boring. Even the non generic missions are boring and crowded with mountains. I played a "Demolition" mission which requires you to walk through a lot of structures and shoot up the base to complete it. This process is very poorly explained. You are even told to watch your step to avoid unnecessary damage, which is the opposite to running through a 7 story building. Several failed attempts, learned that every few minutes 2 mechs and several vehicles will spawn and charge me until I die. No difficulty selection, early game is hard.

Just lacks any feel and flow. Ridiculous walks around to get things done between the missions. Controls are worse than earlier titles of the series. You can see all the flaws listed in earlier reviews. I really longed for another Mechwarrior simulation, but this is truly disappointing; stopped playing after 3-4 cumbersome hours or so.

Tl,DR - I regret the purchase. Initially played it for a few weeks. Combination of gameplay problems make the missions a unsatisfactory. I am comparing it to previous versions of Mechwarrior - your radar is awful, short range only and loses contacts all the time. You can routinely visually spot enemies that you cannot inspect or pick up on your radar. That, out the gate cripples long range missiles whose biggest boon is tracking a locked target - except they are best used at longest range possible because they spread out their damage and are not effective at killing targets. Their one benefit was being able to engage at long range and front load damage before the enemy closed in - except you can't lock on to the enemy until they are in range of almost all weapons so that's the end of that. Many missions involve enemies just popping into existence well withing engagement range, makes trying to use tactics a hopeless proposition. Many missions rely on spam of enemies. Any in-universe, stock mech that relies on ammunition is unusable as you will run out of ammo a third of the way through the mission. Missiles and AutoCannons are mostly non-viable, unless you want to try very easy missions where you can stand to sacrifice a lot of power in order to go with quadruple+ ammunition. That basically means sooner than later are going to be playing with only lasers and PPCs and you are going to be building everything for only one tactic of close ranged fights because that's what the game will force on you. oh and by the way at some point the game updated and now will no longer even launch. Just freezes after first loading screens. No hardware changes on my computer since the last time it worked

I played Mechwarrior/Commander and BATTLETECH 2018. From macro perspective MW5 looks closer to BATTLETECH but made much worse. Pros - Mech visual, combat, weapon sound effects. - Optimization Cons - Combat. -- Sensor logic: enemy units highlight bleeps from any range. Yet tend to lose sensor signal even in direct line of sight(and thus waste your missile barrages). Tank shoots you and you can't have missile lock on it. -- Can't give move order on map, so for lance control you have to be on top of something. Same for air strikes - useless -- 2x maximum zoom - bye-bye long range combat. - Combat maps. On minimap looks like MMO procedurally generated arenas, rather than pice of real terrain. By visual is the same: black moon desert with no atmosphere and suddenly square of skyscraper city in the middle of nowhere; tons of randomly created annoying rocks; mountains, forming pipelike gaps. - Music. This is 3rd of 300+ played games, where I preferred to turn it off. - Base development. None. You have Leopard and that's it. - Mech customization. Totally broken. You will never get to situation, when there is not enough space for modules. No more specialized setups, like 2 gauss Marauder sniper or Madcat missile platform. Feels like MMO grinder optimization. -- Weapon slots locked not only to type, but also to size of weapon. Weapon have 5(6) grades. So in most of times you stick to basic set, just upgrading tiers. -- Heat sinks have very little effect. Heat management is broken -- poor set of additional modules - Story. -- Characters visual and animation like in TES/Fallout 3: stone bodies open mouth sometimes. -- No personalities, just puppets with missions for you. And this is with so personal main plot driver. -- Awful voice acting. -- Pilots portraits better fit to Brigador universe. -- No random events - Global map. Reputation logic is broken. Conclusion: - for story, characters and macro play BATTLETECH - for combats - MW: online