Want interesting arena mechanics, like getting paid extra for going into a match outnumbered? Want a neat tournament structure to fight your way up?
Want Solaris VII, famed combat arena world, to be a unique and amazing place in the Inner Sphere?
This DLC has none of that.
-Arena fights are just another type of contract. It's about as lazy and simple as they could make it.
-In one ffa match, an enemy mech spawned close to me, and they got a salvo in on the front of my mech before the little intro cutscene even finished playing, so I couldn't even control my mech while I was being hit.
-In free for all events, enemy mechs will just stand still until they see another mech. I won several of these matches by creeping around the venue and coring mechs from behind.
-When they do see each other, you can just hide in a corner and let everyone else grind themselves down. There's no in-game penalty for this, like a shot clock or damage- or kill-based rewards. The devs just make the player choose between fun and interesting gameplay or the clearly better optimal way, which is bad game design.
-Dead mechs ragdoll in immersion-breaking ways, sometimes writhing like a body caught in a door in HL2, or flying a hundred meters straight up in the air.
-I got a bonus objective in an arena ffa to take out a particular mech quickly. Problem is they spawned me too far from that mech and I literally could not even get LOS with the target before the objective timer ran out.
-I got a 1v1 duel match, but they spawned me over 3km from the other mech, and because it couldn't see me the other mech didn't move. So I had a long, boring jog to start the match, and then I killed the other mech in 20 seconds.
-The arena announcer will say you're on a killing spree from other mechs killing each other, even when you haven't done a single point of damage.
-The arena announcers get pretty repetitive, which is expected, but you have no option to specifically turn them off. Would that have been so hard to program?
-Enemies kills during arena FFA battles seem to count towards your own kill quotas even when you can't see what's happening and haven't hit them for a single point of damage. That makes no sense.
-The ground textures for one of the arenas seemed to just, fail to load properly? It looked like a placeholder non-texture, just bland smooth colors.
-Game stutters to a halt for a few seconds every time you put in repair orders for a mech. Every single time. Amateur hour programming.
-You get an embarrassingly simplistic animation of your dropship flying during loading screens for transition between systems, but it stutters and freezes so much you get to see almost none of it. It'd be far less frustrating as a static image.
Overall the whole thing stinks of minimal effort, which is on par with the base game.
I long for the day when someone other than Piranha Games can get the Mechwarrior license, so maybe we could get actually good games instead of these piles of meh.
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