MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries - Solaris Showdown

New update is half the price of the base game, with many of the same problems as the previous DLCs. and many of the existing base game problems still present. To go over the issues still there from the last DLCs that get carried over: 1: You're expected to dump your current save file and start again.... Again. 2: Many of the voice lines that play at the end of the story missions cut off because they try to keep playing after the screen fades to black to take you back to the after action results. 3: Extreme balancing issues. In fights with more than 2 factions in a FFA, all factions invariably team up and turn on you. And some new issues with Solaris Showdown: 1: Current match announcers are extraordinarily bland, annoying or both. 2: Cotton deserves a special mention. He has only a few voice lines and all of them have me nearly screaming "SHUT THE **** UP" at the game. And I can't turn it off either as he talks about being shot down for proposing to his ex again. 3: Duncan Fisher's voice lines were actually annoying for once. Never once in either fan content or his original MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries performance did I ever think "I wish he would shut up." Now, I do. Constantly. I watched some recently released fan content he did for Tex of the Black Pants Legion to make sure and had no problem with it. No, it's this game, not the VA George Ledoux. 4: The length of the story involved in Solaris Showdown is incredibly short. This is doubly disapponting since a number of the maps are straight lifted from MechWarrior Online. All up, this is incredibly disappointing for the price. The purple scattergun PPC is kinda neat I guess though.

As already mentioned, the story of this DLC is short and it is adding some weapons and Mechs. The main problem are the arena battles on Solaris. While those maps and fights where fun in MW4, they are bad in MW5. First of all, the maps are simply bad. Not so much in their layout, but Hitboxes are not in line with the visual. You can get stuck all over the place. There are even parts of the maps, that seem to be part of the map on the minimap, that are fine to move when you see it - and then you will hit an invisible wall. And the NPC pathfinding works as bad. Even with the latest patch on most matches at last one will get stuck. Lucky enough every now and then you will get some kind of Ping for all remaining Mechs on the minimap. But this doesn't help on the jungle map, where one of the enemies is missing like 3/4 of the time. It is simply not there. And if you are in a unrestricted match (100t load weight for one Mech or 400t for 4 pilots), even joining with a 400t Assault Mech Lance, don't expect to see many heavy Mechs. Not to speak about Assault ones. Add in the regular AI of MW5, that is about "focus at the player" and you will have a lot of "fun" in a 9 Mech free for (better call it all at the player). Because of that the only way I was able to win some of the campaign missions was to cheese the game by standing behind a door of my starting area, simply waiting for NPCs to show so I can shoot them through the door. All in all the DLC feels like a cheap slapped together cash grab. And that is sad because it got lots of good ideas to play with.

Tack on another star after they iron out the bugs in a few months; In particular, on the last map where your lance forgets how to walk through a door and get focused down one-by-one unless you micromanage their movement to the millimeter, and enemies with jumpjets flying around getting stuck in the geometry and you not being able to find them (which was FIXED FOR YEARS in older game modes with periodic radar pings). If you're still interested in the DLC, I strongly suggest waiting in the shielded area at the start of Free-for-All matches in order for the enemies to start shooting each other, otherwise you're gonna take a few cheap shots by the entire map before they 'remember' they're fighting each other. Also, Alpha Strikes will draw aggro from the entire map so only do it when you've got some cover or you're fast and on the move. Now as for the actual review: The story's fine. The voice acting is mostly alright to good save for Cotton, whose every joke has to do with him soiling himself; I largely blame the writer for that. It acts as a sort-of backstory for MW4 Merc's Solaris arena announcer. The music's pretty good (again), save for one song (again), but the worst one among this batch still isn't remotely as bad as Master of War. I'm not sure how many of the "new" arena maps are lifted from Mechwarrior Online, but other than being somewhat buggy they look pretty cool. In particular, the factory map full of destructibles is hard to navigate for the AI, I find. There are a lot of 'remixes' of older mech chassis added with this DLC, along with a nice-looking 65-ton repurposed powerloader that's appears to be a reused destructible environment model. The stars of this DLC, however, are the new weapons; In particular the PPC-X, which IMO is easily the meatiest-sounding, most satisfying weapon to shoot in-game. The new rapid-fire autocannons are fun, but weaker than the regular variants per-shot so their usefulness is limited. etc. TL;DR - Wait a month or two.