INCREDIBLE GAME...WITH MODS

Had to get that out of the way. I've been a MechWarrior/Battletech fan since I was 5 years old, sitting on my dad's lap watching him play MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat. That game was *so* good. The visuals, the music, the AI assistant who chirped at you when you took a critical hit, all of it was so compelling and inventive. I've played every single entry in the series, as well as the MechCommander and Battletech games. I have some perspective behind my opinion on MechWarrior 5!

I, like many, waited awhile for MW5 to hit Steam. As far as I'm concerned, the poor folks at the EGS were beta testers. Early iterations of MW5 were plagued with bugs, terrible enemy spawns, and a general lack of polish and variety. The base game experience now on Steam in 2022 is *much* improved. Don't get me wrong, there are some head scratching design decisions and omissions here, but that's what mods are for and oh man, there are some good ones on offer.

Here are the ones I heartily recommend:
- Advanced zoom (for that MechWarrior 3/4 style 4x popup zoom window)
- Better lighting hangar, which restores the original PC lighting in the hangar that was removed for the console releases
- Better crates, so you actually get useful items from salvage crates you randomly encounter on missions
- Better spawns, because spawns are still borked in the base game. You WILL encounter magically appearing enemies within 100m of your mech without this mod. I don't mean turrets popping out of turret ports, I mean tanks and mechs appearing out of thin air. Absolutely unacceptable, this is a must-have mod
- Coyote's Missions, adds much needed mission variety to procedurally generated contracts
- Dropship Recolour, I like black
- Expanded Logos, for more mercenary company banners
- Fahad's animation tweaks, to make him less...uncanny
- PGI Infantry, an official mod that adds enemy infantry. Great for MW3 immersion
- Infantry tweaks, to make infantry not glow like Power Rangers
- Infantry outline, see above
- Max Tonnage, so you can take a legitimate lance with you on missions and not be arbitrarily restricted
- Mech Shader, to make damaged mechs look less plastic
- Missile Trails, so LRMs leave beautiful black smoke trails. The battlefield comes alive with this one!
- Mod Options, so you can adjust certain mods and their parameters
- More Enemy Mechs, so you can fight something other than Firestarters and Locust
- MW2 Betty, so your audio assitant has some personality and variety! So good for immersion
- MW5 Compatibility, forgot what this one does but it is useful
- No dialog HUD, so you don't have crudely drawn pictures pop up constantly when the enemy are ♥♥♥♥ talking you
- Paint Schemes of the Inner Sphere, adds hundreds of quality paint jobs and patterns to the mechbay
- Pilot Overhaul, allows you to rename, customize, and promote pilots. Adds a ton of depth to your hired hands!
- Purchase Salvage, so you can pay the difference in C-Bills between the 28 salvage shares you were alotted, and the Atlas that costs 30 shares.
- QOL Upgrades, lots of nice tweaks like a repair all button for the mech bay
- Repair Bays, adds repair bays to large garrisons on missions. Adds immersion and a useful tactical option
- Salvage Percent, so you can actually salvage that Warhammer you legged, instead of it being absent from the salvage screen
- Scary Tanks, adds variety to enemy ground vehicles including new types and variants of existing types. Also makes them more resilient as in Tabletop
- Smooth Lasers, beautiful new laser FX
- TS Music Mod, adds in Timothy Seals soundtrack. MUST HAVE MOD, the base game's music is so generic and completely lacks soul. Timothy's covers of classic tracks add a ton to immersion, especially Gotterdammerung
-TRulez AI mod, MUST HAVE MOD. Adds more lancemate command options and makes them less stupid
- Ultra Visual and Weather, makes the game look more modern
- Unlock hidden colour schems, like Paint Schemes of the Inner Sphere
- Dropship weapon rebalance, makes your dropship useful in combat
- vonBiomes, MUST HAVE MOD. Adds numerous, quality biomes to the random contact missions.
- WAR FX, MUST HAVE MOD if your system can take the heat. Adds a ton of great particle effects and turns battles into legitimate chaos
- Weapons Shader, pretty
- XenoPax Optimize, greatly enhanced my rig's performance (I9-9900k, 2080ti, 3440x1440p)

With those items installed, I love this game. Without them, the game lacked variety and lacked the heart of what made MW2 and MW3 so good. Base game is slick, no doubt about it, but these mods really add so much to the immersion and fine detail that the Battletech universe has. I would highly recommend this game with that fat disclaimer!

I may not know a lot about games, but I know a hell of a lot about Battletech. Some would say I occasionally talk about it. That being said, this game is Diet Battletech. It feels like a campaign DLC for MWO and while fun with friends, it still is a far cry from MW4 Mercs, and MW2 of the same.

Is it a Mech Game? Yes. Is it a mech game that can let you ♥♥♥♥ around with friends? Sure.

Wait till its on sale though.

Disclaimer: This is written primarily with fellow single-player-oriented players in mind. There are idiosyncracies with co-op that might not be what you expect or hope for; please review both positive and negative feedback on the mechanics to make an informed decision about whether the way co-op works right now is right for you. Moving onto the singleplayer review:

TL;DR Summary: Do you enjoy the MW IP? You'll PROBABLY like this game, but might wanna wait for a sale or do more research.

Do you like a sandbox campaign where you play at your own pace but you don't really have a compelling reason to move forward beyond your own motivation? You MIGHT like this game, if you're into the general setting of giant mechs, even if you're unfamiliar with MW, but again might wanna wait for sale.

If only one of the previous two is true, might wanna wait for a sale. If neither is true, you probably will never like this game.

Have spent a decent amount of time playing this game on a competing game service:

[Deleted link in case it hid my review, it was a screenshot, but I have 3d, 16h, 26m and 9s clocked in on said service]

MW5 is not a perfect game. MW5 has a bunch of drama surrounding it. MW5 won't cure cancer, but neither is it the embodiment of Satan. MW5 is decidedly... okay. Worth 30 bucks? Frankly, yes, I'd say so, even if you knew nothing about the Battletech universe. Easily worth that if you do and you'll recognize all the mechs, weapons, and factions in the game.

It lacks an engrossing narrative campaign like in Mechwarriors 2 (and expansions), 3, or 4, though there is... some body of one there. But it serves little purpose other than to give you additional motive to pump up your company and not just sit in the initial low-level area. While on that note, MW5 is very focused on that aspect of the game, with mixed results. If you aren't a fan of running a bunch of procedurally-generated missions to incrementally upgrade your arsenal and mech roster to take on incrementally harder missions with more and deadlier opponents, awesome, go ahead and leave this game behind. If you thrive in a sandbox environment, don't go away just yet.

You fly around the Inner Sphere, doing procgen missions for the 5 Great Houses of the Inner Sphere. If this means nothing to you because you don't know the lore, all you need to know is it's basically like a 5-way civil war where everyone's stabbing everyone else in the back. You're a flagless mercenary commander who signs up for whoever has jobs. You can keep doing jobs for the same faction for loyalty perks (more “negotiation points”), but that's about the extent of that. Said negotiation points are used when taking mission to select bonuses for your pay, salvage rights, or insurance for damage taken (higher rate than points for base pay, but you ONLY get money for damage your 'mechs sustained). Salvaging mechs requires an all-or-nothing value of points, you can't bank parts like in HBS's Battletech, but as you gain loyalty and/or select the right (i.e. multi-mission) contracts, it will give you ample points to afford the heavy cost of mech salvage. Otherwise, weapons and gear take one or more points, with a 'tier' system giving subtle bonuses between weapons of the same type (i.e. a Tier 5 Medium Laser is functionally identical to a Tier 4 one, but has slightly better range, damage, lower heat generation, and so on).

There's a healthy amount of debate about MW5 “dumbing down” the customization from previous titles, about its canonicity, people pointing at the tabletop manuals and arguing about random excerpts... look, the long and short of it is, MW5 has a different paradigm from the previous games, even 4 which was a departure from the TechManual. Where 2 and 3 had the really generous reading of “if it fits crits, it sits” rules from the TT experience and you could shove a bunch of lasers into the legs or something if it made you happy, MW5 opts for a more fluff-oriented approach of battlemechs having a set role. 'Mechs will have, say, 3 "Large" Missile slots, which can each fit up to an LRM-20, or any smaller size of the same family (an LRM-15, 10, or 5, or any size SRM). It's a one-to-one hardpoint swap -- you don't "double up" on smaller sized weapons. A slot's a slot, fitting one and only one weapon; it just has a maximum size that'll fit.

I preferred MW4's system, myself, as it made weapons a bit more abstracted in size (wasn't just small-medium-large, but different numbers of 'sockets' taken per weapon, and components having a number of 'open' sockets that you could fit accordingly), but either way I personally consider it better than MW2 and 3; you may not, and your opinion is perfectly valid, too. My take on it is, if a 'mech is meant to be a missile boat, it's a missile boat – you can't just arbitrarily decide it now carries twin AC/20s. This means that you're forced to prioritize salvaging or purchasing 'mechs (or variants thereof) specific to the roles you want them to serve, rather than the old way of 'mechs basically being “choose your favorite-looking/most-meta-hitbox'ed one” and only using that. I prefer it that way. You may not. If you don't, might as well move on for now.

But, weapons aside -- No Ferro-Fibrous nor Endo-Steel. If you know what this means, you know, and there's much gnashing of teeth and wailing of women at this. Again, call me a shill, but I equivocate it with the lore: At this point in the timeline, FF and ES are both Lostech. And, funnily enough, they are mounted on some Hero or Star League-variant 'mechs, they're just a 'hidden' value that leads to weight reduction according to the calculated value, accurate to TT. Similarly, engines can't be changed in rating, nor can you mount Light/XL engines (Again, something something lore something something Lostech). Again, again, some variants actually have XL engines, 'hidden' from you seeing them on the interface. They even take crits.

EDIT: But, if it catches your attention at all, wishlist the game and wait for the great mod-updating of 2021. Plenty of modders have made Mechlab-expanding projects, and some non-zero value of them are already working on updating for the current build. Nope, I have no idea when they'll be done, but to be fair neither do they; just sayin', if "I want a more-open Mechlab!" is holding you back from this game, fair enough, there will almost certainly be a mod giving you more features in that regards soon.

The game is set roughly in the 30ish years prior to the Clan invasion. What does this mean? Well, if you have passing familiarity with the BT franchise and consider yourself a salty veteran because you played MechAssault once or twice, this means you won't see Timberwolves (“Mad Cats”), Stormcrows (“Ryokens”), Mad Dogs (“Vultures”), or any of the other Clan-designed 'mechs, nor will you see any of the Inner Sphere Clantech-derived designs that have been 'poster mechs' like the Bushwacker or Uziel. The game does feature a subtle time progression mechanism, such that as you play the game (and progress in the timeline), 'mechs with more powerful weaponry, or later variants (with different weapon slots) will begin spawning as opponents and in shops.

The game, at least at a surface glance for the purposes of this review, DOES appear to just... FEEL better than the pre-patch version. There are a bunch of UI tweaks that clean up a lot of what you're looking at, and a bunch of subtle immersion stuff like character lipsyncing has been added. Dumb, I know, but have to say it because there's a committed force of trolls ranting and raving about how it's literally the same since day 1. I've been playing on and off since day 1. It's not.

I return to my first rhetorical, do you like sandboxes? If you don't, then you probably won't like this game, but that doesn't really mean the game is objectively bad, it just means you don't like sandboxes.

Without mods this game is aggressively "meh". PGI needs a swift kick up the arse. They got very complacent because nobody else is making Mechwarrior games, so what are you gonna do, not play? If you're not going to mod this, or are getting this on a console, get it at a deep sale.

THAT SAID, with mods this becomes so, SO much better, it's not even funny. My main recommendation would be either YAML (haven't personally tried that one out) or MercTech (the one I'm running rn). They add so much customizability and potential to the otherwise slim base game.

Want to drop the engine down from a 340 to a 320 on your Victor? Sure. Or maybe you want to slap in a 380 clan XL into your Banshee and give it a pair of hatchets? Go nuts! New weapon calibers, new equipment, unlocked customization, slap in the TTRulez AI mod and give your lancemates battle roles! Change your mech's cooling to double! Give it Ferro-fibrous armor! The possibilities are, uh, not exactly endless, but it sure beats the ♥♥♥♥ out of whatever the base game is doing.

The game itself is, like I said, pretty mid. The story is uninspired, more or less just there to have an excuse for things to happen. The gameplay is really good though. There's nothing quite like sitting into a 100 ton avatar of death and destruction, accompanied by 3 other 100 ton avatars, and beating the snot out of other 25 - 100 ton goons. Weapons sound and feel good (and could sound and feel even better with mods, cough cough), the mechs feel good to pilot, having enough of the signature weight and inertia to really make you feel like Batman. Piloting a mech.

One major downside of the game is the braindead AI. Mods make it tolerable, but it's still pretty bad. In vanilla though, your lancemates will sniff fuel and eat glue while the enemy pilots are divinely inspired marksmen that have trained since their inception to land a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ gauss slug in between the asscheeks of a mosquito at 1000 meters away. BLINDFOLDED. It is so frustrating to watch your team do the poopshuffle in place while you're getting dismantled by omega cracked enemy AI. To be honest, if there was no mod support, I'd flat out not recommend this game solely for that reason.

At the end of the day, there are much worse games out there. And if you want Mechwarrior, it's either this, Online, or trying to fiddle with getting the older games to work. Beggars can't be choosers I guess.

We need the oldschool Mech Warrior games on Steam too!

Hell yeah I'd recommend this.. but not vanilla. As great as the foundation laid out by PGI is, the base game is just too barren and missing that bit of OOMPH to really make it shine. Enter; MODDERS. Once again, another game greatly amplified and extended and improved upon by the homebrew community.

*MercTech

https://www.nexusmods.com/mechwarrior5mercenaries/mods/48

*PirateTech

https://www.nexusmods.com/mechwarrior5mercenaries/mods/349

*Coyote's Mission Pack

https://www.nexusmods.com/mechwarrior5mercenaries/mods/263

*PilotOverhaul

https://www.nexusmods.com/mechwarrior5mercenaries/mods/477

*vonBiomes

https://www.nexusmods.com/mechwarrior5mercenaries/mods/441

These are not just outstanding mods, but I would say they are close to as essential as you can get. Each one offers massive, yet balanced, additions and changes to the game and turns it from an okay 'Mech shooter into a sprawling, in-depth, strategy-laced, supreme RPG -- taking you right the way into the Clan Invasion! It's a fantastic game, truly engrossing, the 'Mech construction and kitting out is so enjoyable, the missions varied (though with only 6 or 7 archetypes they can get more than a little stale towards the end of the 100+ hour playthrough), and the overall story is enjoyable enough to keep your attention.

Sadly the performance leaves a lot to be desire, it's truly wretched more often than not, regardless of how powerful your machine is - the engine just buckles and it can't seem to handle its own weight. It's not uncommon to see framerates dropping to the low teens during heavy fights, yet CPU and GPU usage remain frustratingly low. Still, if you can put up with that (and if I can, you can!) you're in for one hell of a 'Mech stompy adventure. Just, again, don't play vanilla.. get those mods (or the likes of YAML and TTRulez AI) to truly experience what this game can offer.

This game is amazing with a HOTAS, VR and Mods.
Nexus Mods:
VRWARRIOR
MW5Compatibility
Steam Mods:
NoTonnageLimit
BetterSalvageShares
For Hotas:
VJoy + Joystick Gremlin
evilC/MW5HOTAS - github

It will blow your mind!

I would not recommend playing this game without mods. Keep in mind, both the host and co-op players must have mods installed to play together.

Recommended mods (If you can't find them on the Steam workshop, they are on Nexusmods instead):

von Biomes
Pilot Overhaul
Coyote's Mission Pack
Co-op Unlocked (if you play co-op)
War_FX
Yet Another Mechlab
Yet Another Mechlab Mechs
Yet Another Special Variant
Yet Another Equipment Collection
Yet Another Clan Mech
Yet Another Weapon Clan
TTRulez_AIMod2
Remove Jumpship Animation

I liked this game, I really did.

But when you realize that AI completely ignores everything and everyone to focus you, it totally breaks immersion and forces you to play in a single way - tank.

Like you will literally see enemy mechs walk through and around 3 of your AI allied pilots to rush you.
A pity, really.

It's kinda like the fat free version of MechWarrior, by default it is very "streamlined" (read: missing features). The story is very generic but let's be honest you are buying this for career mode.
Basically everything but the most basic stuff needs to be either modded in or is dlc.
Don't want to play as generic Gamerguy? Mod!
Want an actual mech lab where you can tune your stuff and select equipment like in MWO? Mod!
More than 10 company logos? Mod!
Competent AI? Mod!
Melee weapons? Dlc!
This game is like overprice instant Ramen, you gotta put like an egg in there or some veggies maybe some sriracha?
Coop is fun tho.

Only buy on sale.