First of all, the gameplay: Graphics are good enough, you won't hurt your eyes with this. Performance is okay (Max settings with 3600X / 1070 / 64Gb), loading times can be optimised as I run it on a HDD, not a SSD or M2 NVMe. What else to say about the gameplay. It is turn based. The story has traces of RPG elements, aswell as the surrounding world. There are differing planets with their own biomes or mixes of different biomes where you finish contracts on, like jungles, deserts, highlands and moon biomes. Tacticwise, that means you need to handle different surface conditions, like the lunar biome, where the lack of atmosphere makes sinking heat extremely difficult. Jungle biomes will give you increased heat sinking capabilities aswell as flora and fauna which give cover to your mechs. Coming to the contracts, there is a handful with different objectives and side objectives, so the game doesn't get repetitive right from the beginning and completing side objectives gives a bonus on income you'd get for succesful completion. While choosing a contract you want to do for a faction, you can choose between, payment, mechparts and reputation, while increasing one will decrease the other two. Speaking of factions, there are about 9 factions, each with their alliances and foes. Completing contracts for factions will increase your reputation with them and you gain higher rewarding contracts which are also more difficult. Becoming ally of a faction grants you access to their faction store with specialized gear and mechs. Arguably the pirates offer the best 'faction store', the blackmarket. The Campaign: I'd advise to play through this the first run you play this game. It is fairly easy and you get cash thrown at you after a somewhat tough start. Your mechwarriors at the start are weak with low abilities and will often miss shots, but that gets better fast as you progress. The abilities are interesting and balanced and you could adjust your mechs to your mechwarriors abilities
I wanted to buy this because of nostalgia. It still is a great game, fallen a bit out of time, just a little old. Game gets a lot better after installing OpenRCT2. There are essential features, like unlocked framerate, multiplayer, new coaster track pieces, better performance. OpenRCT2 is free and you can help out with development if you want to. Development still is active. Can't really go wrong if you came for nostalgia and buy it for a reduced price. You will find it is greatly enhanced with OpenRCT2. Game with OpenRCT2 runs great on Win10, AMD Ryzen 3600X, GTX 1070 and also Win10, AMD 5600, GTX 1080ti.
