MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries

Do not purchase without the expansions. The combat is always fun. The late game outside of combat sucks so hard. Every potential step forward comes with the potential for five steps backwards in the late game. Tons of terrible, overly punitive interactions between the combat engine and the outfit management elements. Late game mechs move so slow. The way the difficulty curve works (more oppurtunity for damage), is fine for a game with a fixed campaign. It's terrible in a game where you take random missions in between fixed missions. Unless you make money or get better gear, they don't help you at all. Finishing the mission isn't enough. One of the worst is lumping all of the independent factions into a single faction. Unless you want to grind for cash or reload constantly, you'll go broke doing the plot missions. Keep good standing with independents, or prepare to go bankrupt when you do a plot mission. If you're wondering why you see 50 hour, 1 star reviews like this - it's because I've had all the fun in the game before I've beaten it. Which absolutely ruins the fun I had at the beginning. If they aren't going to fix the base game, they should stop selling it. Bundle it with the legend of the kestrel lancers. They need to fix the base game, or they need to stop selling it.

This is really more of an arcade game then a sim. If your looking for an updated version of the last 4+ Mechwarrior titles, keep waiting, this one has very little to do with them.

I never played this game without the HOTIS DLC; It felt like a complete game with it, and worth what I paid. I would not buy the standard edition by itself unless it was heavily discounted. My only previous Mechwarrior game was the free MekTek repack of Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries. The gameplay is similar, It improved in some ways but declined in others; General graphics are better, better weapon balance, but it misses basic features like your mech physically recoiling after big hits or straight up knocking mechs over with alpha strikes, and you were able to drop with two lances in MW4M instead of just one. There are a lot more hand-crafted missions available in MW5M then there were in MW4M, but in general the scenarios are less interesting or complex. The vanilla game very much likes to just throw wave after wave of enemies at you to wear you down, however using pre-mission intel to decide on your Lance composition will definitely make a difference. Friendly AI ranges from 'borderline special needs' to 'competent enough', but most of the time you can't just leave them alone to do their thing. Lance orders exist for a reason in this game. Sound FX are a sidegrade but the Soundtrack itself is alright with about as many bangers as MW4M had. The dialogue from characters is generally acceptable but there are times when you can tell some of it was just placeholder dialogue they left in. MW5M's Mech designs were borrowed from Piranha's 'Mechwarrior Online', a competitive twitch shooter; It shows because some of designs of the mechs that were in MW4M look like they were butchered in order provide a 'fair' side profile for a competitive shooter. The Zeus specifically, which is now built like one of the card people from 'Alice in Wonderland', comes to mind. There are other victims, like the Battlemaster, but they're not as bad. TL;DR - Try Mechwarrior 4 Mercs out first since it's abandonware; If you like the combat, you will probably like this game. Mods make it better.

Requires login to the MW servers in order to play a first person game. Disappointed and uninstalled the game without playing. My main reasons for purchasing games on GOG is to avoid DRM issues. Looking at the software again, it says serial keys depleted. Out of the 100+ GOG games I have purchased, this is the one I regret most. (More than the ones that were buggy).

The game holds great potential, but there is way too much grinding for money and Exp. The jobs are all the same and the story unfolds at a crawling pace. I do not know if the game becomes any better later in the game, but after 23 hours of gameplay, I gave up on it. It could have been so good...!