A very mixed, but otherwise solid game.

Off the top, it is a return to the MechWarrior series of video games, set in the Battletech universe. The last numbered entry, MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, released in 2002, a side game to MechWarrior 4: Vengeance, although the series would live-on with MechWarrior Online in 2013, up until this game's release in 2019. This return to the main series, as such, is a competent entry into the series, showing off Piranha Games experience after years of development with MechWarrior Online and serving as a solid flagpole entry to stake their claim to the franchise.

The game is divided into two main modes of play, management, and combat. These two primary game systems find their roots as far back as the original MechWarrior entry, and as such, it is a well-worn and practiced game play loop. Combat, of course, is the main draw for the majority of the game's prospective player base, and the years of refining Online, the so called "World of Tanks with Mechs", show here best. That being said, the comparison is apt; MechWarrior falls squarely in the real robot sub-genre of mecha media, and the machines you'll pilot are slower and very plodding. Maps can be large, and objectives spread out, so the slower nature of the game may be a turn off for some in that regard. I say can, as the majority of missions you'll complete are randomly generated. There are several biomes, with a variety of weather considerations as well, and enemy disposition and where they are on the map is dependent on the roll of the dice. It is repetitive for certain, but if you enjoy playing the game, you will not want for missions to complete

For the most part, combat involves going somewhere, and killing things to complete your objective, preferably before you take too much damage. The particulars provide some, but not much, in terms of variety. The mission types on offer are:

• Assassination
• Raid
• Demolition
• Defense
• Warzone

For the most part, they are what they say on the tin. Assassination missions ask you to go to objective markers and kill specific enemies, Demolition asks you to go and destroy a base. The most common enemies the player will encounter are turrets and tanks. They can have various models and weapon loadouts, but for the most part, do not present a massive threat in small numbers. Tanks do have heavy versions, such as the Partisan or Manticore, that are much more threatening, and have enough sticking power to be annoying. Otherwise, you'll often encounter VTOLs, helicopters by another name, and these trade fragility for mobility. They're not actually too hard to hit, so they mostly serve to waste your time. Unlike the ground based turrets and tanks, they can't take advantage of cover, so your allies will usually see them immediately, and usually peg them faster than you can if you need one or two shots at longer ranges. Finally, you'll be facing down the 'Mechs. Please note, "'Mech" is the Battletech term for their big robots, and "mech" is the general cultural term to refer to the concept of big robots. Capiche? ANYWAY This is where the greatest variety of enemies come from. They have as many options as you do when it comes to what they can pilot, variants included, though they will stick to the loadouts that the game provides, rather than taking full advantage of customization like you can. They are not particularly complex; when they see enemies they attack. As far as I can tell they follow three simple rules as far as what they target. Their lowest priority will usually be whatever they see first, which will usually be the player. Unless you want to significantly slow your play speed, sending your allies out to scout is a no go, and their tight leash means that when you're leading the pack, you are properly leading that pack. Their second priority is whatever currently the biggest threat, which is where the most grey area involved in judging what they're picking, but basic aggro rules apply, the highest dps gets it. Their final, highest priority, is if they see a part is about to break or a 'Mech is about to die. If you, or your allies, have a part with compromised armor, nothing will break the attention of every enemy present from trying to fully break it.

While this makes the enemies very simplistic in their tactics, this ironically becomes their greatest strength in the late game. At max, the player has their 3 allies, for a four man team. Enemies tend to field a lot more, the vast majority being the turrets, tanks, and VTOLs as mentioned. These enemies, in large enough swarms are still a threat however; I embarrassingly once lost my main player character and 'Mech during a mission to a tank getting a bang on autocannon shot after waves of enemies tore through my cockpits armor. Underestimate them at your own risk. The danger of swarms becomes more pronounced with the 'Mechs in the later levels, as you'll often be forced to fight upwards of 12 enemy 'Mechs in a mission. While a number that may not inspire fear initially, that is still at least three full 'Mechs for every one of your teammates, who aren't particularly good at one on ones. The game has the option to the relieve you of these grinding slogs of attrition; it simply does not.

A tutorial mission will introduce you to repair bays on the field. These are one time use healing stations, but when you use them you're out of the battle temporarily while it does it's work. The only other downside is that it cannot repair frame damage, if your outer armor cracks and the internals start taking punishment, the most the repair bay can do is put some armor around it. Other than this tutorial, and two missions at the very end of the game, the repair bays are essentially not mechanics of the game, meaning its all about damage avoidance and management. All 'Mechs have 8 parts: cockpit, center torso, right and left side torso, and the arms and legs. These parts can't take much direct damage to their inner frame, but have a layer of outer armor on them for defense. Once that breaks, the sensitive inner components become vulnerable, and can be destroyed from there. It is thus possible to disarm your foes, and be disarmed in turn, as getting your arm blown off means you won't be firing whatever weapon it had anytime soon. The torso parts also have separately tracked armor for its back, usually considerably weaker than the front. To down a 'Mech, you have four options. FIrstly, you can totally disarm them, although in some cases this would also entail just breaking every part on them anyway, fulfilling other conditions for a kill. You can also take out it's legs, immobilizing it and causing the pilot to scuttle the machine, much the same as when its unable to fight. You can also destroy the center torso, which will cause a reactor breach. In this case, don't stand too close, as the subsequent explosion is going to hurt. Finally, you can go for the throat, so to speak, and target the cockpit. Destroying this will kill the pilot and stop the machine in its tracks, leaving you to salvage it for yourself.

Aside from the immediate gameplay penalties taking damage incurs, there are additional costs on the management side that also provide ample reason to do your best to avoid getting crippled. More on that later.

The player has some tactical options in the accomplishment of their objectives of course. A Raid mission, which asks you to destroy specific objects at various locations on the map (essentially an infrastructure based Assassination mission) does not require you kill anything; there is even an achievement for not killing a single enemy while completing a Raid mission. Similarly, you do not technically need to kill anything while you tear down a base in a Demolition contract, or kill anyone but your targets in Assassinations. In practice, there is little advantage to doing that, aside from maybe speed-running. Such non-aggressive actions will only mean ever increasing threats firing upon you, and no matter how much armor you have, you'll go down eventually in those later missions if you're a pacifist.

Other tactical options include a command menu for the three NPC allies you can have on your team. These are pretty simple, you can tell them to attack your target, follow you, go to a point, or turn off/on their weapons. These orders can be given to one party member at a time, or to all three. The odd one out of these orders is the toggling of their weapons, as it never seems to serve any purpose. A stipulation of Defense missions is that you also need to avoid damaging the location yourself, be that walking into things and crushing them under your weight or accidentally shooting your laser array into it. Such a matter would seem the best use case, but generally, the NPC allies never proved much of a risk in Defense missions. Their AI effortlessly navigates around the fragile objects around them and will not open fire until they have a shot to make, and so telling them to stand down is just a needless liability. That option aside, the command menu is useful, if unwieldy on mouse and keyboard in my opinion. Usage of it, from selecting the unit/s to the orders, is done using F1-F4. While there are potentially worse keys to use for the system, and mostly a matter of keyboard size, I would have preferred another option, outside of rebinding things. Of course, rebinding solves such issues, but as a matter of on-boarding and learning controls, I believe that avoiding having cumbersome default bindings is important. Beyond that, it is a non-issue.

As an aside, I have played Clans to completion, so I can mention that the issuance of commands got a big upgrade in that game. I'd like to review that game itself, and chew on it a bit more, but in short, while retaining the function key arrangement, they also added an option to click in your mouses scroll wheel, which brings up a radial menu to initiate those commands. This makes it much easier to make full functionality of the system.

Regardless, while these commands are useful for certain, they're also essentially the only way to make your allies consistently useful. When left to their own devices, your allies will follow you, maintaining a pretty tight leash, and will attack whatever attracts their attention. I believe they also mirror some of the behaviors of the enemy AI, but I did not stress test this to be honest; once I realized their limited utility when left alone vs when ordered, I micromanaged their every act. This also led to no small feeling of resentment, mostly when I sent them to do something on their own. Their tight leash, plus the need to be micromanaged, meant that if they were ordered to kill someone or destroy something a ways off, they certainly would. They would then immediately start walking back to you, where ever you might be at that moment, while putting up only token resistance to whatever enemies are most likely swarming them. In the end, their best utility is simply in their ability to focus fire on one target when ordered, a tactic I used liberally throughout my play time. I often found that my allies, left on their own when an engagement began, would target whatever they saw first, while the enemies, seeing me first, would solely target me. Unable to effectively gauge enemy threat at the opening of a conflict, they would also usually never be effective enough to establish aggro on important threats before said threats, and all the other, less important, but still swarming tanks and helicopters, did enough damage for them to focus me as the weakest target. By utilizing focus fire, I found I could much more quickly bring down individual foes of course, but by assigning a target and then simply not attacking myself, but engaging evasive maneuvers, my allies would now be gaining aggro with their focused assaults.

One final important thing with regards to combat. Each mission, relative to its difficulty, has a weight limit. If you exceed the weight limit, you will receive reduced rewards, the percentage of which is determined by the excess, and also prevents you from doing the mission totally if you are past a certain point. The max weight is 400 tons, as this is the max possible anyways, being accomplished by having a team of 4 Atlas assault 'Mechs. There are no direct consequences for being under the weight limit, even by significant margins, other than likely being of such low armor that direct conflict likely should be avoided. Its highly recommended to be close, due to the large number of enemies in the late game, but it was never a requirement. More often than not, I was able to stick to my customized Marauder, a heavy 'Mech that fell into a fire support role. Not too slow, but not particularly tanky, it allowed me to bring heavy firepower to bare, and when customized away from the default load out, it had very little downsides, at least in my hands.

Enough about combat, time for the true autism: Management simulation

It is as solid as the combat is, but not particularly engaging. You have the entirety of Battletech's Inner Sphere starmap to play in with in game events occurring for about a 50 year period in game. Traveling between stars takes time, and costs money, though not too much for short trips. As you travel, you can put in work orders to change the loadout of your 'Mech, be it an upgrade of a weapon it already used or changing it up to something in the same weight class and damage type. You can also put in an order to repair your machines, as any damage they ended a mission with is retained. If you would like to be efficient, you place orders before you travel, but to be honest, there is not really a penalty for wasting in game time by just putting in the orders once you get to where you're going. If a machine isn't ready in time for the mission, the game forces time to pass until it is. It is a similar story with your allied pilots, who can be hurt if their machine takes too much damage.

The hiring of pilots, as well as buying 'Mechs, and equipment is primarily done in industrial hubs, collections of worlds dedicated to, what else, industry. Weapons can come in different qualities, and sometimes rare items are on offer, which also applies to the 'Mechs. For the most part, the stock of any particular system are damaged machines, meaning you'll also need to repair them, and will be one of many variations on a basic frame. As such while there may be some departure between stats between two variants of the same 'Mech, the general handling and performance will largely remain the same. The rare variants appropriately are different enough to give you different tools to play with, and also have full health. There is one more tier above that, Hero 'Mechs, which are unique to characters who, for all intents and purposes of this game, exist only in lore. This can be fun, they can also be trash. At least one main mission included an enemy Hero 'Mech, but much like it won't be changing the fundamentals of how you play when you use them, it doesn't give the enemy that much of an advantage. Prototypes and ace customs are cool, but they go down all the same to massed fire.

There are also conflict zones, the areas where all the fighting is happening. You go in to find contracts from one of the interested parties in the area, which you can parse from the starmap.

An important note on the starmap zones, with regards to repairing in between missions. Worlds that fall outside of a conflict zone or industrial zone do not have the resources to support your work orders, and thus its not possible to repair there. This is essentially a non-issue until the very end of the game, with the final campaign missions taking place a decent distance away from the nearest industrial zone, adding needless busy work to travel back and forth just to do the next mission. Other than that, you can repair in conflict zones, but you will incur, at minimum, a 15% upcharge on all work orders, and they will take longer as well. Again, time is not much of a concern, but the money issue is ever present, so you will want to return to industrial hubs to get them done when you're a bit short.

Apart from buying new things and doing work orders, you have bills to pay, because escapism is dead. How much you need to pay each pay period depends on how many 'Mechs you have ready for combat, and how many pilots you have on payroll. You can instantly send a 'Mech to cold storage for free, removing it from the bills you have to pay, but if you want to use it again, you have to put in a work order to re-equip it, on top of manually re-equipping it. As far as pilots go, as mentioned, you can hire them at industrial hubs. They have a stats, with their potential maximum for those stats displayed alongside the current skill level. This is a use-to-improve system, so they will become better at using energy weapons the longer they do. They also have stats for how good they are at evading shots, and for avoiding damage. When their 'Mech takes too much damage, they'll get hurt, and if they go down, there is every chance they will die. That being said, you get one allied pilot during the tutorial for free, but absolutely none of them have any story or truly defining feature, except that tutorial guy, whose story begins and ends there.

Perhaps simultaneously the most and least interesting matter of management is the faction system. First, the lackluster: your allegiances and rivalries do not matter in a grander context, from what I can tell. Being sworn enemies with House Liao never disqualified me from undertaking their missions, although there were costs to be sure. As well, I am not certain if being a Hero for House Kurita unlocked any special undertaking either. These grander factions do not involve themselves in the main campaign in any meaningful way, with the only faction whose allegiance will particularly matter when focusing on that is the Independents.

More positively is the actual gameplay considerations your reputations have. When taking on a mission, you are given the chance to negotiate the rewards of said contract. You have three main matters to consider: more money, more salvage, or insurance for damage you take. If the issuing faction likes you, you will be able to ask for even more rewards, and more of each as well. If a faction hates you, you'll be able to ask for less, and for less of each. It is a simple reward/penalty system, but it does present a material form of consequence for consistently acting against one faction over another. Aside from how faction standing affects negotiations, I like the system. It is one of several inherited and iterated on from older titles, and thus has meat on its bones. Bargaining for more money is a very clear payout, ensured cash so long as you complete the mission. Salvage rights gives you more shares of said salvage. Salvage is dropped from everything you kill in a mission, and can be as little as mere ammo, which is frankly never in short supply, or entire 'Mechs you have downed. These 'Mechs retain all damage done, and will have lost any weapons you knocked off of them. This incentivizes the player to go for those harder headshot kills in fights, as the other methods of downing enemy 'Mechs will mean a greater repair cost if you want to use it, or less money if you want to sell it. That being said, the higher the quality of item, the more shares it costs. If you want to actually pick up those downed 'Mechs, especially the ones you took down skillfully, you need to haggle for those salvage rights. As far as damage insurance goes, it never felt necessary? The higher your insurance, the more coverage you have for damage you take. If you take a lot of damage, you are sure to be able to pay off the repairs if you invest your negotiation points in it, but otherwise, you don't receive a payout if you don't take damage. Investing in insurance means punishment for playing well, and willfully relinquishing better rewards to do so. Not highly recommended.

Then again, the game does not have much story anyway. It is a very simple revenge story, with slight intrigue, but largely the details will only matter if you're a Battletech fan, and don't do a fantastic job at drawing in new fans on its own. Also, quite importantly, the game is not canon to Battletech anyway. I did some research, and while most Battletech licensed video games tend to stick to the canon, they themselves are not themselves. They aren't considered to be like, heresy or anything, just the line judges who decide these things will refer to the books and table top first and foremost, disregarding anything from the games that contradict those sources. Just a bit interesting but yeah, the game doesn't exactly have a gripping plot, and even though I understand what the ending means, if anything it made it even less underwhelming. Your dad came from the Clans... Big whoop? Barring a game with a plot that serves as a direct sequel or a book canonizes and explores that idea, its simply not important enough for it to matter.

I should mention, I did not play the game with any of the DLC, and do not plan to anytime soon. I've had my fill for now, and had fun. The solid frame of a game that is Mercenaries would be expanded upon properly with 2024's MechWarrior 5: Clans, a game whose story has no connection whatsoever, but at least attempted to have a better story.

I just want to say I really like this game. It looks great and feels great. I Think it has one of the best UIs in a combat sim that i've yet to see. Finding where the nearest enemy that just popped up on your radar is a cinch. Maneuvering your mech is all quite easy and getting a bead or lead on your target an hitting them with your cannons or lasers is a skill that I found I was able to learn. Perhaps some of my skill comes from muscle memory of all the hours sank into MechWarrior 2 when i was younger, but compared to that game, this game feels so much more natural and easier.

That's not to say this game itself is easy. I find myself going through each mission in my campaign very slowly and not tackling hard missions until I'm sure I'm capable. Get cocky and you'll be humbled.

But this sort of is where the pitfall of MechWarrior 5 is. It's not that it's meticulous, but it's monotonous. I shy away from exploring other mechs other than 1 at a time that i practice and train with so I can be the best I can be in my missions. I Don't experiment or explore too much or get clever with fighting, and I do everything the same way 'by the book' I don't mix up my mech's load outs or even install new weapons too often on my person mech for the same reasons. So, all in all, this makes for a bit of a monotonous slow grind as you get more money, mechs, loot, and levels. In this sense a campaign will play EXACTLY THE WAY YOUR CAMPAGINS IN BATTLETECH DO.

I simply assume this is based on the pen and paper wargame, and in some ways, it translates fine into a video game, but it is a slow grind. YMMV, it might help to play it with 3 other human friendly allies who might outperform the standard AI teammates, that might let you all get away being more squirrely or more experimental with your combat or weapons loadouts.

In any case its a fantastic MechWarrior game, it's long windedness doesn't bother me as I like to have a game like this I can always pick up and play every now and then. I still only have medium class mechs and hope that by the late stage of my campaign i'll have more freedom (both financial and security) to experiment more and fool around with things.

Also, I was going to throw down some cash for a joystick to play this because that just seems cool, and was looking at a dual joystick setup where you get two of the Thrustmaster T.16000M FCS but the more i looked and read into it, it seems that 1. this game can be real tricky to get working with some joysticks and 2. it's actually more challenging to play with a joystick than shoot with the mouse