TL:DR Do NOT buy! Go download Mechcommander Gold, still free from the owners of it to this day! Good: -visuals & ui -music -voice acting -story stuff Bad: There is NO radar system; The entire lock on mechanic is line of sight! If you know anything about LRM's, this means they are essentially useless. LRMs are still required at medium range because SRMs are all dumbfire! (there are no MRMs) The AI is dumber then any other mechwarrior game I've EVER played! I have played mechwarrrior 3 onwards! When the ai companions detect an enemy, they will advance on that enemy until they are within kissing distance and rarely do more then take a couple steps side to side. They WILL occasionally fire at an enemy... however they target randomly unless you choose their target. This works against vehicles and is suicidal against mechs. They WILL shoot their allies in the back. They WILL fire a weapon when NOT facing an enemy at all! Mechcommander Gold has better ai and that game is ANCIENT. Skill levels in a weapon type gives damage multipliers, instead of aim. Aim is 100% perfect accuracy, unless the target is moving, then it gets a random miss value added. This guarantees that you will always take massive damage to your mechs and usually lose systems, etc before the mission is over. This is shit because.... You get paid less then repair costs for the average mission! The above also assumes you can maneuver and shoot well; if you can't, you are completely relying on the ai, who are pretty worthless in the area of avoidance. EVERYTHING takes stupidly long periods of time! Jumping to the next system over?; 20 days. Repairing ONLY the armour on a mech?; half a month at minimum. Adding a few weapons system?; adds a mimum of another month... usually multiple months! I forced myself to play this for roughly several weeks off and on, trying to like it. I can't; it's a bad mechwarrior game; all the mechanics are poorly thought out and VERY badly implemented!
The exploration is great. The mood due to sound and environment is great. The story is interesting. The little bites of lore you find around are often short peeks into what happened before. I only have a few complaints: 1) The story at the end is unfinished. I mean you can infer what happens after, but it would've been more interesting to have just one or two more chapters actually DOING that. 2) Burned-to-death guy showing up later makes no sense. 3) You vow to kill Aubrey, but don't actually get to.... as far as I can tell. He might've been one of the two who you fry in the last chapter; but according to prior audio, Tesla already took care of him earlier while you were on the way. 4) the chase scenes suck! You have to find your way through mazelike corridors that are poorly lit. You have no previous experience in any of those area, so you have to figure it out as you go. The monsters move FASTER then you do while sprinting. This all combines to make the chase scenes a boring chore that you have to repeat over and over just to pass them! :-( In a suspense game where you can't fight, the monster should not actually show itself to the end... end pop out over and over and over! These lightbulb-in-mouth things are far more suited to a game where you can fight back, like bioshock, etc.
