Mechwarrior 5 Review

Catapult my Beloved  

I may be a touch late to the party, so I'm going to skip the usual pleasantries on this one. Mechwarrior 5 is big, stompy, tank controlled giant robot action after the series was dormant for an extended period. It had issues, DLC fixes some, mods fix others. I'm mainly writing this, cause I'm curious if anyone shares my opinion on a few core elements.

Firstly, the core movement and shooting gameplay. I want to state outright that I think the actual mech piloting and action is a 10/10. Using every edge Unreal Engine offers to make these giant robots come alive when your lance touches down. From the whirring of a falling helicopter to the chunky loading of an AC/20. Each mech visibly showing your loadout and parts flying across the battlefield as limbs are torn to to shreds. Every mech feels different thanks to both a custom cockpit and varying engines and torso/arm aiming systems. When Mechwarrior Online came out over a decade ago, I thought it felt fantastic and for years wished they could just slot the system into a single player game. In the end, that wish is easily realized and proven true, they absolutely nailed the game feel to the point that I could easily recommend the game for it alone.

Which is fantastic, because here comes the big negative. The actual AI and level design is absolutely dreadful. 90% of missions are entirely randomized, which is fine. But they're all infinite variations on the exact same randomization. An amount of tanks, helicopters, and mechs are thrown at you in strength and numbers proportional to difficulty level. Sometimes you can snipe and be tactical, but every single fight is essentially a variation on those two elements. Your goal always being to maximize damage on the enemy, in turn minimizing their damage to you.

Except the big issue, is that the game's balancing is not designed with that you vs an army energy in mind. It's balanced like a multiplayer game, every single enemy is using the same tools and equipment you are. There's just more of them, which doesn't work since if you have 5 tanks with an ac/20 each. That's the equivalent of 5 ac/20s firing at you in a manner that you cannot prevent just by having a bigger mech. It doesn't matter how weak the enemy is, they overwhelm you with sheer unrelenting numbers.

The most fun I had in this game was in the Solaris DLC arena fights. Being actually based on an Arena match, it's exclusively mech vs mech in relatively even sizes and loadouts. That should tell you everything about the issue with the rest of this games mission design. The scripted missions aren't any better, they all similarly fall into "here's an ambush with a bunch of mechs, thanks, and helicopters again."

Maybe, maybe this could've been fixed if the AI were up to snuff. If it was like a musou where your own teams skill vastly outpaces most enemies abilities, thus allowing you to go all out. But unfortunately that doesn't work from either angle. Teammate AI is atrocious, and the enemy is not much better. Both have a tendency to barge mindlessly into close range combat in literally every single circumstance. You win this game, because you as the player have the sense to focus fire and actually disable your foe before changing targets. That's it. Again, except in Arenas, I really have no complaints about those except that free-for-all has the AI struggling to fight each other when you're around. But they're so basic as missions it hardly seems fair.

Maybe if you mod this game to hell and back, it can resemble something truly amazing. Turn into an infinitely replayable Mechwarrior Roguelike or something. As it stands, play it only with friends, and ideally with a friend who knows what mod pack to put together to make that happen. I'd say just play Mechwarrior Online, but I don't know if that game is in a good state for a free to play title.

 I wonder if Clans is any better...