What a waste of great potential! The customization is great, the weapons work as they should (for the most part), the animations are nice, in some moments it just oozes battletech atmosphere, but than the flaws kick in. And they kick like a Steiner scout lance. For example as you are limited to one lance throughout the game, anything but your heaviest gear is a waste of a mech-slot. With only four mechs you would shoot yourself in the foot quite severly by using light mechs later on. Also, your Ship can house 12 fully build mechs, why not just let us use them? The difficulty rating is somewhat useless, a three "star" mission can be done in 10 minutes and consist of mostly mediums, but a two star mission throws heavies at you and kills halve your team. And speaking of team, you can build specialists, but only a handfull of combinations is really usefull in the late game, especially the flat damage reduction while not moving is basically a must have, while evasion looses it's appeal quickly in later levels due to the shear amount of enemy fire. Speaking of, some weapon combinations are just straight up better than others (medium lasers en mass). But the biggest problem is the story and your choices or to be more precise: your LACK of any. In the proloug lady arano talks about how she doesn't know what motivated you, how it might be greed or your good heart. But honestly, you have no choice whatsoever, you are the good guy. You can give some snazzy answers in the dialog, but you will STILL have to do the mission. Yes you can chose a lot of side missions and who to work for there, but in the main quest, no deviation whatsoever is allowed. That in itself would not be a problem in a linear game, but then why bring choice up at all? Why tease choice when there is none? And the game would no doubt profit from more choices to for example betray lady arano and follow her uncle instead, i can't imagine this beeing a big problem, most of the story is text-only dialog anyway.
