I've played Mechwarrior games for thirty years or so. I own Battletech books and I played Battletech on tabletop. I painted miniatures -- whole units' worth with their own paint schemes. I played Mechwarrior: Dark Age, and find myself mildly disgusted that "Mechwarrior" has become the title that people most recognize this franchise from, but whatever. The point is, I have standards when it comes to Battletech properties, and this did not meet them until I modded it to within an inch of its life. The base game is fine for awhile, but eventually becomes tedious and frustrating due to repetitive and/or bad mission design and fairy poor single player campaign design. Luckily, the developers had just enough wisdom to realize they weren't actually much good at their jobs, (Unreal engine? Do you want me to be impressed?) so they made it very easy to make and install mods. If you are willing to spend a lot of time on Nexus or Steam Workshop, you can tweak this into a very good Mechwarrior/Battletech title, maybe even the best ever. My gripe is that you absolutely have to mod this game to make it really feel like Battletech. There are so many arbitrary elements, like restrictions on tonnage, pilot development, etc, that it just blatanty reveals a failure on the part of the devs to understand what Battletech is or how it should feel. Part of being in a Battlemech is feeling powerful, for instance, but this game goes out of its way in vanilla to make you feel terrified all the time. Past the first few hours of gameplay, missions make the player feel weak and undergunned. Excuse me, *Piranha* Games, whose logo is for some reason a bull skull, but I am not supposed to feel scared in 75 tons of steel and dakka. If I wanted to feel scared and desperate, I'd play a horror game, not a giant robot destruction derby simulator. I'm out of characters, but the point is this: If you love Battletech, you can make this game evoke it, but you will need to spend time modding.
I have tried to convince myself I love this game for 44 hours, but the truth is that without the alt-f4 cheat or quitting every mission that goes sideways to prevent losses of crew and bombers, the game is just a long, miserable grind. I went through the campaign using the above trick, and it was fine. Some of the mechanics are actually pretty cool. However, (unless the game is meant as an artistic anti-war statement by causing you to rack up a huge number of dead crew on the memorial monument wall in the title screen) playing it as designed, as I have tried to do for the last two days out of pure curiosity, is a disaster. The mission rewards are just too small for you to recoup the losses you will suffer from any loss of crew or aircraft. What happens is that you build a decent little bomber and crew, advance through maybe one or two critical missions, and then you get shot down because odds are just against you, by which I mean you are the only bomber, and are typically under attack by as many as a dozen fighters at a time -- on top of anti-aircraft fire. So you die, and now your upgraded bomber is gone, along with many of your crew, and you do NOT have enough money to reproduce a setup of similar efficacy. So you have to carefully, gingerly grind for several hours to get something back with which you can advance, and it's VERY likely that you will need to cheat to keep your anemic new crewmembers and underpowered bomber alive and aloft long enough to make that happen. If you still choose NOT to cheat, prepare to abort many, many missions, losing many hours and suffering much frustration. Now, this is in some ways an accurate depiction of WWII bomber combat, but I'm not sure a cutesy, chibi-character game like this was really the place to try to do that. Worse, it would have been easy to avoid the whole problem by just giving the player enough money and xp per mission to recoup losses efficiently. Still, I think the game is fun... but ONLY if you cheat.
