I really wanted to like this. A hand-crafted, no proc gen, linear story game in the BattleTech universe. It's even set from the Clan perspective!

But it does a lot wrong.

The game feels more like a puzzle shooter than a mech game. Especially in higher difficulties, you really feel punished for not doing what the game expects you to do. By the end, it's 5x dire wolves, all pulse lasers, or you screwed up. There's little by way of actual progression, the game gives you slowly heavier chassis as the campaign goes on, and just expects you to use them or get smoked. The opposition forces are sometimes super silly in number - there are missions where your 5 man star is expected to deal with 30-40 mechs in sequence, plus vehicles. A lot of the lategame missions really overstay their welcome.

The game also has this sense of just being a bit half-baked. The difficulty setting simply adjusts the number on the enemy health bars. Your star mates will randomly miss shots based on the enemy evasion rating. It's honestly kinda odd watching them target their "miss" with pinpoint accuracy with their lasers. The game has this cycles per mission system, but it's all 5 cycles per mission as far as I can tell. Sometimes, the briefing will say that you have deploy again ASAP, but there's plenty of time to go back to the ship, repair and rearm, and go back in again.

By the end, I felt like the whole thing was a chore, and I was glad to be finished. Little desire to play again.

The earlier missions are 100% more enjoyable than the last 2 planets, so maybe pick it up when on sale, keep the difficulty at normal (which as far as I can tell doesn't adjust the armor values) and enjoy in a weekend. Armored Core 6, MechWarrior 5 Mercs, and MechWarrior 4 (which is abandonware and totally free!) just do this game better.

we needed a MW5 mercs But with clans and the story element.. we need to be able to make our custom character and a open world gameplay. For some reason they just can't seem to combine all the elements that could make this game good. The idea was good but the delivery was so so. Look it's not a horrible game, i quite enjoyed the bad ass clan smoke jaguar. BUT this came out AFTER mercs..... i feel like this game regressed in gameplay mechanics in order to give us more cut scenes? it was fun at first but then once you finish the campaign there is not much re-playability... Mods to fix this? they don't allow mods for this game...

Absolutely horrendous mission design, which sees you be assaulted by dozens and dozens of mechs per mission. This wouldn't be an issue, but leads to a huge slog especially after a certain midpoint in the campaign, and none of it helps with the fact that they decide to give you two repair stations only for your four mechs to use to refresh their supplies and armor. If it has to get to that point, then the missions are too long.

I've never had to look up an actual gameplay guide for a game in decades, and most of it for the last few missions boil down to cheesing via filling your star with the last assault mech available in the game to carry multiple PPC's. And all this was on story mode difficulty.

The story itself is good in my opinion, but if the same type of slog missions return in Ghost Bear's DLC, then i'm not going to buy it.

If you like challenging games, then go ahead and buy this. But even I enjoyed Elden Ring but couldn't deal with the annoyance of these mission designs.