Overview
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is a sandbox-style mech game where you pilot huge hulks of twisted steel and sex appeal. If sex appeal took the form of cannons the size of a Greyhound bus and pods with enough rockets to blot out the sun. You pilot these beautiful machines in either first or third person, but you don’t simply play with a single mech.
Over time you accumulate hangars upon hangars of metallic monstrosities. All of which you manage, pilot, customize, and stick brain-dead AI companions into so you can lament the repair cost of fixing the mech when they inevitably get themselves blown up.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!
If unlike me, you actually have friends that appreciate the majesty of mechs, you can stick them into your precious walking WMDs instead in full four-player co-op. That way you have an actual person to complain to when you have to foot a massive repair bill for their incompetence.
The thing is, I really like Mechs, but I don’t like most Mech games. That’s because, for me, mechs are the coolest when they are huge lumbering bipedal tanks. However, most media involving mechs treats them like super-powered anime characters wearing a suit of armor. I don’t want to know what happens in the next episode of Dragon Ball Z. I want to lumber around as a clunky 50-ton war machine.
That’s part of what makes MechWarrior shine. It has a blatant disregard for common popular gaming conventions. Mechs are slow, the gameplay is methodical, and the time to kill is very, very high. You rarely gun down an enemy in seconds. Instead, you chip away at the armor of their specific components to blow off limbs and weapons, all while managing the heat your own mech is generating, keeping tabs on your ammo reserves, and trying to absorb the impact of incoming fire to the less vital parts of your mech.
At the same time, you feel incredibly powerful as you lumber around and smash through buildings. Every cannon shot feels massive, and you feel the impact on both yourself and the enemy. Battling from inside these massive walking tanks simply feels good.
That same methodical gameplay is retained outside of combat, as you spend hours tweaking and outfitting mechs, searching for the perfect weapons, footing repair bills, debating which mechs to keep active, and carefully pouring over contracts because travel time matters.
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is really good, so good in fact that it’s only a handful of tweaks away from being near perfection in my eyes. This makes it completely maddening that MechWarrior 5: Clans was announced as a totally separate and ugh…linear game.
| Gideon’s Bias | MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: No | Publisher: Piranha Games |
| Hours Played: 100+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: Xbox Series X | Platforms: PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4 & 5 |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: First/Third Person Mech Shooting and Management. |
| Mode Played: Normal and Custom | Price: $29.99 |
Additional Bias: I reviewed MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries with all 6 existing DLCs
Hot Mech on Mech Action
Piloting a mech in MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries feels much closer to driving a tank in other games, and it helps to think of it like that. The upper and lower body of your mech moves independently of one another. Your legs can keep moving you in one direction, while your torso rotates like a gun turret. Stopping, accelerating, and turning can feel varying degrees of sluggish depending on your mech, but it’s an intentional kind of sluggish, not a janky kind.
Your weapons also turn at varying degrees depending on where they are placed on your mech, the torso, or your arms, and you have two targeting crosshairs to help you utilize that fact. While you do have to battle vehicles such as gunships, tanks, and turrets, and those enemies can’t be ignored without consequences. The real meat of the game is battling enemy mechs.
Every mech is divided into several parts each with their own front and back armor and health pools. Be it your mech, an allied mech, or an enemy mech. Every one of these parts can be blown up, removing any weapons, ammo, or parts that were attached to them.
You can actually bring down a mech in one of four ways. Destroying the head kills the pilot, but the head of a mech is usually the smallest target.
Destroying a mech’s torso brings it down but can also cause its reactor to go critical and explode, making it unlikely to be salvageable. Taking out all of its weapons will cause the pilot to eject, but you obviously won’t be able to salvage any weapons from it.
Finally, taking out both legs puts a mech out of commission, and increases the chance you can salvage it. This makes every fight a tactical affair, and it definitely varies between mechs. Some mechs have an easier torso to hit for example, while others have arms that stick out. You’re approach is going to be a balancing of risk vs reward based on what you want out of the fight, and how many salvage rights you negotiated before the mission, which is something I’ll talk about later.
Sometimes it’s more effective to knock out a mech’s heavy weapons, leaving them fairly toothless unless you wanted said weapons. The Hunchback mech, for example, has a good portion of its firepower concentrated on its right shoulder. Other times it might be better to down a leg of a faster mech to make it an easy target.
You have to balance these risks, not just for the potential loot vs the risk of you failing the mission, but the simple fact that the more damage your mechs take, the more costly the repair bill will be, and destroyed weapons are gone. If you found or bought a really high-grade Gauss Rifle, and it gets blasted off your mech, you lose it.
Combat in MechWarrior isn’t just a gear check against the enemy mechs. While strong weapons and good aim pay off, so does playing smart. You can use terrain as cover, when your weapons are on cooldown, get a building between you and the enemy, use rocks to block missile barrages, and use hills to break target locks.
When an enemy is focused on a teammate, you can get behind them to target the often weaker rear armor. If a mech has close-range weaponry, and you have long-range missiles, you can outdistance them. If the reverse is true, you can close in so they can’t use them, and maybe even throw a King Kong-sized punch or two.
In open combat, you can maneuver to try and absorb an enemy’s shots on your less important bits. For example, on the Centurian mech, they have an open arm that even has a little shield. If you lose that arm, it isn’t a huge deal, so you can swing it into the way of gunfire. The nuance of the combat has a steeper learning curve than other shooters but is immensely satisfying as you learn how to control each of the many types of mech in the game.
The mechs may be big and cumbersome, but the combat isn’t just about directly grinding against each other until one of the mechs falls. There are a lot of tactical considerations to make, and your bank account may be one such consideration.
Running a Mercenary Company
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries has two major gameplay elements that are vastly different from one another. Combat and actually running your band of mercs. Everything you do in one element, however, affects the other deeply.
To start off you have operating costs, storage fees, and salaries to pay. Plus any money you spend on new weapons, gear, mechs, repairs, and hiring pilots. Managing money is a very important part of the game and while that may sound like an unappealing chore, the sheer ownership the game gives you over how that money is made or expended makes it a satisfying and tactical part of the sandbox.
You see, there are no passive income generators. You get money by taking on contracts, all of which you personally fight in, or by selling mechs or weapons you have salvaged from those contracts. The thing is, you have complete control over this aspect of the game. You choose which contracts to take, but just saying that is underselling what is actually happening.
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is a sandbox galaxy, even in the campaign mode. You choose where to travel, traveling takes money, but also time and so do repairs and refits. There are numerous factions that you can take on contracts for. Before each mission you negotiate shares of what you’re getting out of the contract. The higher your reputation with the faction, the more leverage you have.
You can select a combination of earning more money, increasing the amount of salvage you’re allowed to take, having your employer cover a certain amount of damage to your mechs, or even gaining some airstrike support for the mission. How you decide on the terms of each contract depends on how you think any given contract is going to go, what you want out of it, and what your situation is.
You can gain entirely new mechs and weapons from salvage, but each piece has a point cost, and the more salvage shares you ask for, the more you get. At the same time, you might need the money to pay your bills next quarter. If a mission goes poorly and you went for more salvage over the money, your repair bills may exceed your payment by a wide margin.
You also have to think about what you’re going to do after the contract. Repairing in a conflict zone is much more costly than in an industrial zone. At the same time, traveling costs money, and days. Repairs also take days, so it’s often good to have mechs refitted as you travel. However, taking on multiple contracts in one area is profitable. Can you field enough mechs to do multiple missions consecutively? Heck, some contracts have you face a chain of missions with no time for repairs and refits in between.
It’s all part of this juicy sandbox with a sharp management edge where your choices and performances in each contract dictates your income. No single contract is in a vacuum. You have to plan for your journey ahead.
I want this juicy contract here, and then I’ll start traveling this way, stop at that system for these two contracts because that faction likes me and will pay really well, hop over to that hub for repairs, do an arena fight, and then move these two mechs into cold storage to lower my operating costs 5 days before the bills due.
On paper, it might sound like tedious busy work, and I won’t lie to you. You do sometimes have to math out if it would be more profitable to repair in a conflict zone or move to an industrial hub first.
However, in practice, it makes for a fun management sim aspect that compliments, affects, and is affected by the combat side of the game. It forces you to make tough decisions at every stage of the game based on several ever-changing factors.
That said, you can tweak all of these factors by utilizing the custom difficulty sliders that MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries offers.
Mech a Bear Workshop
Mechs can be highly customized in MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, but within set parameters. Each model of mech and its variants has a focus, so to speak. They have various-sized hard points for missiles, laser, and ballistic weapons, as well as specialized gear. They also have a ton of open slots to store ammo and heatsinks.
Mechs also have a tonnage limit based on whether they are a light, medium, heavy, or assault mech. Within those constraints, you can customize your mechs how you want, right down to how much armor is on the front or back of every limb.
One example of how this customization might go, is you may have a mech with a bunch of large missle slots. You could slot in large long-range missiles that weigh a lot and make it a long-range bombardier. Or perhaps you slot in a lot of lighter close-range missiles and stack extra ammo, heatsinks, and armor to fill the rest of the weight, making it a short-range explosive tank.
Maybe you shoot for lasers on one mech since they don’t use ammo, but then you have to account for the extra heat generation with heatsinks. You might use jump jets on one mech. On another you might turn it into a long-range sniper, or maybe you give it a lot of armor and a big honking axe.
I find the tonnage limits interesting because contracts also have them, and if you send mechs that push the tonnage over the contract limit, you get fewer rewards. This makes you think about how to outfit your team of four that gets dropped planetside. It also gives you a bit more freedom than you might think.
You might assume that light mechs eventually get outclassed by heavier mechs for example, and you would be right. Pitting a lance of light mechs in a high-tonnage contract is suicide. Although, I bet there are some really cool tactics you could pull off in co-op by utilizing a speedy light mech alongside heavier teammates. But back to my original point, however, the game is a sandbox.
There’s nothing stopping you from returning to regions with low tonnage contracts where you can utilize your light mechs. In fact, there are times when it makes financial sense to do so. I’ve had a rough couple of missions where I had to toss my heavier mechs into cold storage to avoid bankruptcy, and rely on those lower tonnage contracts.
There have also been times when I’ve been forced to use less-than-ideal lances at critical junctures in a multi-mission chain, where my A and B teams needed repaired. It was rough but manageable.
It all feels very cohesive, strategic, and most importantly fun. Your decisions have weight, in combat, before combat, and after combat when you’re in the hangar.
The Galaxies Dumbest Pilots
There is a catch-22 that severely impacts MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries fun factor and holds it back from perfection. The incredibly stupid AI-controlled squadmates that you’re forced to entrust with your precious mechs.
You don’t really have a choice either, you may hate them, but you need them. Most missions simply can’t be completed with a single mech. A single mech can’t take the combined fire of several enemy mechs and be expected to live.
You hire individual pilots throughout the game, they all have stats and can level up. These stats do matter a great deal. A pilot with a 10 in evasion is going to get hit a lot less than one with 2 in evasion. And at the basic level, they are semi-competent. If you outfit their mechs well and match those mechs to what they are good at, they do a lot of damage and help take the fire off of you.
The problem arises in how limited their strategic capabilities are. The best way I can describe this is to imagine you teach a dog to sit. You tell it to sit, so it sits, good dog! Now what if the dog suddenly becomes under siege by a pack of rabid squirrels while you aren’t there? Instead of fighting back, or getting away from the squirrels, it remains sitting and when you come home, there is a dog skeleton sitting in its place with several plump carnivorous squirrels napping after a good meal.
That’s the extent of the tricks your squadmates know. If they follow you, they follow you, very, very closely. If there’s an enemy, they will fight it, but only while following you so close that they could suck the fart straight from your butthole without it ever touching fresh air.
Did a weeny little light mech get behind your squadmate’s giant assault mech while he followed you? Your squadmate could turn around for literally half a second and swat it down. He will instead take more backshots than a pornstar.
You can tell them to attack a specific unit and they will haul ass after that unit, and ignore everything else around them. Since mechs take a while to bring down, they can be getting blasted by numerous other enemies while making zero attempts at evading their gunfire.
You can tell them to stay in place, and they will do exactly that, only moving around an itty bitty circle from where you ordered them. Let’s say you order a squadmate with a long-range missile mech to stay behind and provide long-range cover support. They will do that, but if three other mechs happen to have spawned near them. They’re dead. They will not try to move into an effective range or do anything other than mope around that tiny little area while getting blasted.
You have to understand, this isn’t an RTS with a top-down view. You’re piloting your own mech from the first or third person. You can’t keep track and micromanage these idiots well enough to account for their sheer lack of basic survival skills. It can be absolutely maddening and it honestly severely limits some of the tactics you can employ.
Going back to what I said earlier about mixed lances. There are some contracts with several small artillery installations spread out over a large map. One really good tactic would be to use a well-armed light mech to hit some of those installations while the rest of the lance engages the brunt of the force. You can’t do that with the AI. They can’t be ordered to go engage those installations and if you have a light mech, they are going to get slaughtered trying to follow you, or surrounded if you tell them to stay in place.
Whenever one of these hiccups leads to one of your squaddies getting blown up, that’s a ton of money in repairs and weapons lost that feels entirely unfair. It feels awful, and this is a fact that permeates the entire game because you have to deal with it every single mission.
Your pilots have names and I couldn’t care less about them, they are walking stat sheets to me because they are far too stupid for me to care about when one of them actually dies with the mech they blew up. I’m more upset about the mech!
It’s an issue that only affects the solo experience, but a massive one. It makes me desperately wish my friends weren’t lame and actually liked mechs because playing co-op sounds heavenly.
DLC Feels Necessary
I started playing MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries with the full package of the base game and all six DLCs, and I gotta say, that was for the best. I hate to say it, but without the DLCs the game would feel incredibly bare. Not only do the DLCs greatly expand the number of mechs and weapons, they really add variety to the whole game.
Entire mission types, arena battles, rival mercenary companies, and even melee weapons are locked behind various DLCs. Heck, the Heroes of the Innersphere DLC introduces career mode. While the campaign is sandboxy, the career mode puts a sandbox in your sandbox so you can sandbox while you sandbox. It introduces new starting locations and initial mech set-ups that really amplify the replay value.
Each of the DLCs is really good, that’s not the problem. The problem is, this is a review, and asking you to go all in on a game you have never played is a big ask. The base game, when taken alone is so bare that I’m hesitant to recommend it at all.
While the DLCs definitely complete the game, they shouldn’t be needed to feel like you got a complete experience with the base game, and that is definitely the case with MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries.
Verdict
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is so, so close to being a near-perfect mech game. It does have some performance issues, at least on Xbox Series X. I’ve crashed numerous times, and in some battles, the framerate quite literally turns into a slideshow. I’d hate to see how the game plays on a last-generation console.
However, the biggest issue is, by far, the squadmate’s AI. A few tweaks would send the game hurtling over the line from good to utterly amazing. I know this because if I had even a single Mechnophiliac friend to play with, you would have to pry the controller from my hands with an extremely large crowbar to make me stop playing. If I had three such friends, bring some wet wipes and a cigarette too, the cigarette is for me.
That’s why I’m frustrated at the existence of Clans. For one, it means Mercenaries is unlikely to get those needed tweaks, and secondly, it’s not an updated sequel to Mercenaries but an entirely different game. Cutting the sandbox out of MechWarrior for a linear campaign feels like cutting the strategic layer from X-COM. You can do it (X-COM did), but you lose a powerful part of the magic. If I’m not negotiating for salvage shares to add new goodies to my armory, what is even the point? Clans might be like visiting a theme park, but in Mercenaries I own the theme park!
The reality is I adore MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, but it’s like having a favorite sandwich that always has a single thumbtack hidden inside. Sometimes you find it and spit it out. Other times it stabs you in the mouth, and you have to blow a bunch of C-Bills to fix the damage. But it’s always there, every single time you want to eat it.
You can bypass the issue entirely by playing co-op, but I can’t, so that makes me even more bitter. I’m inches away from caressing euphoria but can never touch it.
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is very nearly a fantastic mech game, an incredible sandbox of mech mercenary ecstasy. If you happen to have friends willing to play it with you, it is one. However, if your mecha fan club is a party of one, flying solo can be a truly miserable experience thanks to brain-dead AI-controlled squadmates. Your mileage in single-player will vary on your ability to tolerate them and the impact they have on the financial management side of the game.