Mech Monopoly
If you’re a fan of mechs you don’t exactly have a lot of options out there when it comes to video games, especially if you want to be in the pilot seat of one. If you’re like me and prefer mechs to be slow moving monstrous bipedal tanks as opposed to lightning speed anime characters in a suit of armor, you really only have two choices. MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries, and MechWarrior 5 Clans. If you want the game to actually be good, you’re left with just Mercenaries. Sorry Clanners, your game just isn’t for me.
You can find a video version of this article on YouTube!
MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries first released back in 2019 and has since received 8 DLCs, including one that released just last month. Mercenaries caters to a specific audience, one that enjoys slower paced shooters as opposed to a deluge of low attention span eyeball popping dopamine sparkles that leaves you drooling while your brain cells take a vacation.
That’s not to say that Mercenaries doesn’t give you dopamine, but it comes from the satisfaction of walking an 80 ton machine up to another 80 ton machine and smashing an axe down on its head, killing a pilot through a precision laser head shot that leaves his mech intact to be salvaged, and blotting out the sun with enough missiles to make Tony Stark feel inadequate.
It is however 2026, the price of everything has risen, the points are made up and the rules don’t matter. So, is MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries worth your time and money? After all, with 8 DLCs the buy in can be a little steep. We are going to explore that, the good, the bad and the ugly. I’ll go into why it may or may not be for you, what the DLCs are and whether or not they are important to the MechWarrior experience.
The Pilot Seat
If Mercenaries is your first foray into the world of Battletech, it’s going to play differently from pretty much any other game you have ever played. To start with, neither you nor your enemies have traditional health bars. Instead mechs are made up of various sections. Arms, legs, head, torso and shoulders. Each individual section has armor and internal health. Armor is hit first, then the internals. Reduce an internal to 0, and that part is destroyed, taking any weapons, ammo, and whatever else that was attached to it with it.
A Mech is defeated in one of four ways. If it loses both it legs, when all of it’s weapons are destroyed, or if it’s head is destroyed, which kills the pilot, be it enemy or squad mate. Finally, a mech is defeated if the torso is destroyed, destroying the torso has a chance to detonate the reactor, which greatly reduces the chances it can be salvaged. Why is that important? Well, salvaging parts from fallen mechs, and even the mechs themselves is one of the main ways you actually acquire new stuff, but more on that later.
Your mech controls like a tank, I mean that literally not as an insult. Your torso can turn independent of your legs, and if you use the standard mech controls, you can turn your throttle up or down and the mech will keep its momentum moving until you change it. There is an option you can enable to make your mech control more like a standard shooter, however.
Where your weapons are positioned has an effect on how you shoot them. You have two reticles, one that matches your arms and another for your torso. To give an example of how this might affect things, there is a variant of Hunchback Mech that can concentrate a ton of lasers in it’s shoulder.
I like to fill them up with several of the same type and tier of laser and set them to the same weapon group. By doing so I can fire all of them at once with each of them pinpointing at the exact same spot which absolutely melts whatever you’re aiming at. The downside is, it generates more heat than an AI datacenter and if that shoulder is destroyed the mech will be as about as useful as one. Which is to say, not at all.
Weapons generate heat, if your heat rises too high your mech will shut down. You can override it, but that causes damage to your mech. Lasers tend to generate a lot of heat, but ballistic and missile weapons require ammo, which takes up space on your mech.
What all of this leads to is a very unique style of game play. Generally speaking, you want to keep moving as enemies have a harder time hitting a moving target. But it’s not a spectacle shooter like Doom either. You need to weave behind cover while your weapons are on cool down or your mech is too hot. If you deal too much damage too quick, enemies will focus on you, so it pays to break contact so that your squad mates can draw enemy fire off of you.
All the while you are trying to target different parts of an enemy mech. But what parts you’re targeting depends on the situation and your goal. Limbs and weapons tend to have less armor than the torso, and it can really pay to lower a mechs firepower before going for the kill. Urban Mechs are a good example of this. These walking trashcans are light mechs that move slower than George R. R. Martin writes books. Yet, they almost always carry a big ass autocannon. I always aim for the autocannon first, so it doesn’t clap my cheeks while I try to get through its torso.
If you really want to salvage a particular mech, the head or the legs are your best bet at making that happen. Other times you need a nasty mech to die immediately and you throw everything you have at its torso and hope it’s enough.
The reality is, MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries is a strategy shooter. It’s slow paced with a long time to kill, at least most of the time. Your tactics are going to vary based on your mechs build. You might be a long-range missile boat, or an 80-ton beast with a giant hammer in need of enemy mechs to use as nails. But you have to constantly think and adapt to how you fight.
The combat system is an addictive one because each mission can be a bit unpredictable due to mech types, limb loss and what mechs you brought into the battle. Taking mechs apart piece by piece is incredibly satisfying, and landing well placed killing blows feels amazing.
It’s made even more interesting by the fact that your battles don’t take place in a vacuum. You might win a mission, but in title only. If your mechs take excessive damage or you lose a bunch of weapons, it might not be a true victory. Why? Well, piloting the mech is only one half of the equation, running your Mercenary company is the other, and that means paying for repairs.
Mercenary Freedom
While the campaign features plenty of story missions, the game itself is an open sandbox, but what exactly does that mean? Well, in between story missions you choose what systems to fly to, what contracts to take and how to manage your inventory of pilots, mechs and weapons. Ultimately this puts the success or failure of your campaign in your hands through not just a single mission, but several. Sure, you can save scum if you want. But if you choose to play it iron man style like I do, you can actually fail by running out of money.
You have quarterly bills based on your mechs, pilots and how many mech bays you keep occupied. You can toss mechs into cold storage to eliminate their costs, but doing so unequips them of their gear and you have to spend time and money to reequip them. Time and money are your two main resources, and they are intertwined. Everything takes time, from traveling between systems, to making repairs and even the missions themselves.
When you take on a contract, you choose between a split of money, damage coverage and salvage rights. The higher your reputation with a faction, the more you can squeeze out of them. Money and damage coverage are straight forward, but the more salvage rights you have, the more mechs and equipment you are allowed to take in the aftermath of the mission. You have to balance the scales carefully however, because it’s entirely possible to lose more money in repairs than you actually earned if a mission goes bad, even if you complete it. Furthermore, weapons that are destroyed stay that way, if a high-quality cannon gets destroyed, it’s gone, and you either have to salvage a new one or buy a replacement.
This finance management is further compounded by the fact that repairs and refittings cost more in conflict zones, and less in industrial hubs. However, the act of traveling itself costs both time and money. You have to figure out how to turn the most profit with your missions. Now let me be clear, this isn’t complicated, basic math is all you need, you don’t need to open an excel spreadsheet to file profits and expenditures, though I suppose you could if that’s your thing.
The point is, missions don’t take place in isolation, they fit into a larger meta-game of managing your mercenary company. Some missions can be chained together, requiring that you have several full lances of mechs ready to go, as you may not be able to fully repair them in between. It’s up to you to figure out if the extra monthly cost to house that many mechs is worth it.
Housing a smaller number of mechs is cheaper, but risky, as you’re constantly having to wait on repairs, even if you only ever take on one mission at a time. It’s a very interesting meta-game that feels almost X-COM like in someways, and I think the freedom it offers truly makes Mercenaries one of the most replayable experiences in my library. That said, this is all customizable. There are sliders that let you adjust multipliers up and down to mold the finance side of the game to your liking.
Time itself is also pretty interesting in Mercenaries. It flows within the Inner Sphere with or without you. As the timeline shifts, canonical events within the BattleTech universe happen, new mechs are produced and the map shifts. It’s an interesting playground that changes over time. You can’t be everywhere at once, so it leaves a lot of replay value for future campaigns. Combine all that with the mech customization, and you have a game you can sink hundreds of hours into.
Customization
So, you have the act of piloting the mech and running your mercenary company, But there’s a third piece to the puzzle, customizing your mechs. The mechs you manage to find or salvage and how you outfit them can greatly affect your playstyle and further helps the games replayability. Each mech has several hardpoints made for weapon types such as lasers, missiles and ballistics, and sometimes other equipment. Each mech type has several variants you can find with different hard points. For example, the Hunchback I mentioned earlier is a model of mech, but there are several variants of Hunchback aside from the laser boat I mentioned.
While I’m sure there are likely meta builds for each mech and variant, you can personalize them really well. This is especially true if you don’t fall into the trap of filling out every single hardpoint. For example, in my recent play-through I found a Hero Kintaro Variant.
It has a lot of missile slots and three energy slots. I had the idea to fill it up with short range inferno missiles. It was so effective that I could cause enemy mechs to simply overheat and shutdown mid fight. But I was also overheating myself, even with several sets of double heatsinks. I opted to remove the lasers all together for even more heat sinks and now I have a beastly medium sized mech that punches way above its weight.
Mechs are split into light, medium, heavy and assault, and there is a range of tonnage within each category. No matter how many slots a mech has, you can’t go over the tonnage limit, and everything from ammo to weapons to armor adds weight. You can get pretty creative tweaking these builds, and if you really want to get into the minute detail of it, you can even choose how much armor is spread between individual limbs. You also can ignore most of it, at least to some degree. You can take a mechs stock load out and simply put higher quality weapons of the same type in its slots to upgrade it.
It’s a system that gives back what you put into it, but if you don’t want to customize every mech in detail, you don’t have too. You control the buttons you press, and that includes whether or not you think your stock mechs can handle a higher difficulty contract. On the flip side if you want to get even more personal you can paint and even name your mechs.
You aren’t just customizing the mechs you pilot, but also the ones that your AI squad mates pilot, and that all circles back together to form a specific kind of tactical approach designed by you when you take four of them into a mission.
Squad Mate AI
Love them or hate you, you’re going to need them. You simply can’t sustain all the gunfire coming your way alone, so every mission you will take in three AI controlled pilots that you hired, into mechs you have outfitted. Back when I first reviewed Mercenaries a couple of years ago, this was the sorest spot for me. I hated them with a passion, and they almost made me walk away from the game several times.
Now, I haven’t had a look at the games code to truly know if anything changed, so this might be placebo. But as of my most recent playthrough they feel much more competent, I’m not raging at them as much and it seems like they don’t try to get into melee punching matches with heavier mechs nearly as often as they did.
That said, there is being slightly more competent, and being “good” and they certainly aren’t good. The problem actually comes down to the order system, and how terribly it’s implemented. You see, you can issue fairly simple orders. Follow your lead, attack target, or move to location. On paper this seems fine, in practice it ranges from mildly okay, to hair pulling frustration. It’s irritating because I feel like it’s a problem that can be solved with relative ease if the developer took the time to do it.
The first is the follow command, which they always do by default. They just follow too damn close to you. If you skirt past some enemies, they follow close and get shot in the back while being unable to respond. If you pivot in another direction, they stall out to change direction with you and take a bunch of unneeded shots.
If you tell them to move to location, they do, and then wobble back in forth in such a small area that they can’t evade any gunfire if another mech closes in
If you issue the attack order, they attack the target, but ignore all other enemies in the meantime. The frustrating thing is, they actually fight quite well when you issue an attack order. They evade, move to optimal ranges for their weapons and otherwise do decently well. What I would love more than anything, is a fight freely command that would allow them to fight just like that, but while choosing their own targets.
Why? Well, at least on game-pad it’s several button presses to try and command an individual squad mate to attack a target. You have to be sensor locked on to the target and if they happen to dip behind an object, you lose the sensor lock. It can be maddening to try and cycle through enemies trying to issue specific attack orders while piloting your own mech. Which just leads me to have them focus fire most of the time, which can work, but requires a lot of babysitting, which is the crux of the issue.
I can technically have a missile boat teammate take position up on a mountain, but then I have to baby sit them. You have to understand these orders are being issued through my own viewpoint in first or third person. To order a squad mate to move somewhere, I have to aim there manually and issue the order. To order the attack, I have to sensor lock the enemy. All while piloting myself in the middle of battle. If I happen to miss that a red icon on the map met up with my green icon ally over on the mountain I left him on, he blows up, I pay millions in repairs, and the pilot may die.
If I could just have them fight freely, or at least expand the area that they follow me or wait around in. I could at least feel like their failures were fair, rather than a failure in my ability to babysit them. The system doesn’t need a massive overhaul with super smart AI, just a few tweaks would make a massive difference.
However the stark reality is that without mods, which aren’t an option for console players, squad mates will be a component you have to fight with whenever your play. They certainly feel more competent than I remember, but can still bring down the experience at times, especially because they are an ever present part of the game. If you happen to have real friends to play with, however, That changes things.
Co-op
If you have some friends to play with the dynamic changes and you erase Mercenaries biggest weakness, which is the squad-mate AI. However, not everyone will love how the co-op is implemented. Essentially the host plays as they would normally, and any co-op partners, of which you can have up to 3, are just along for the ride.
They take on the role of pilots you have hired, and you can assign them mechs to use. You can also give them permission to customize mechs and buy gear for them. But all the progression and merc company decision making belongs to the host. Your co-op partners won’t even really be able to see what your doing on the starmap, and might have a difficult time getting invested into the hosts world.
It’s for this reason I’ve actually turned down several offers from viewers to play with me. With my own friends it’s one thing, but I’d feel like I was using a stranger’s time for my own pleasure. My friends who know me better can help take part in decision by council, even if it’s still technically my campaign. That would feel awkward with a stranger. Unfortunately for me, most of friends aren’t interested in the game. Hey, not everyone shares my excellent taste in video games. It’s a shame really.
There is a beneficial flip side to this method of co-op, however. Since co-op partners are tag alongs, only the host needs any and all DLC. The other players can play with and use any DLC related features while they tag along.
At the time of writing this, MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries is on gamepass, and it is cross play, so if any friends have gamepass, they can join you with no extra commitment. If you have a friend on PlayStation, they only need the base game, regardless of what DLC you have. I feel like that’s really rare and makes up for the tag along aspect in many ways.
Playing with friends really shakes up the dynamic. You suddenly have a bunch of tactics at your disposal that would have been impossible with the squad mate AI. You can split up to tackle objectives for example, pull off really great flanking maneuvers and more. At worst, you have a real human to berate when they blow up your prized mech and bankrupt your company, and that really does count for something.
Modding
If you play on PC, you have access to a bunch of great mods that can improve or expand the game. As with any game, I consider mods to be a happy bonus rather than a core feature. I have hundreds of hours in the vanilla game…simply because I didn’t know I had another option. I had bought the game and DLC on Xbox, and I never realized that doing so also granted me the Windows Store version…which can be modded. I learned this, two days before writing this.
So, I’ve only just dipped my toes into the modding scene. I discovered the TTRulez_AI Mod to fix the squadmate AI…and I have to say, it’s brilliant, but honestly a bit overkill! It gives you all kinds of options for having your squadmates act different ways which is awesome. One of the options is the “fight freely” option that I desired, and that’s all I really need or want and really wish the vanilla game would implement.
The point is, if you’re on PC, you have a lot of great optional mods you can play with.
However, if you’re a console player, that’s fine too. Vanilla MechWarrior is better than no MechWarrior, and I spend too much time at my desktop as it is, so I’ll still be putting in more time into the Xbox version on my couch.
The DLC Void
It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room and my inspiration for this piece in the first place. In 2026 MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries has 8 DLC’s so far. If you’re just coming in for the first time that can be intimidating. The question is, is the game worth it without them?
My answer is, no, but with a caveat. The caveat is that I’ve always had them, so I don’t know what it’s like to play without them. Maybe it would be a case of being fine because you wouldn’t know what you’re missing. But I feel like, as good as the games core is, it would just feel to barren without the DLCs.
The mech, weapon, mission, and biome variety would be greatly diminished without the DLCs. It’s to the DLCs credit that each one feels pretty good about expanding the overall game, but that also leaves a gaping void if you don’t have them. So, let’s look at our options.
DLC Information & Buyers Guide
Alright, we’re here. If you have made it this far you’re probably bright eyed, bushy tailed and excited to get inside an 80 ton steel death machine. So what should you get? My first answer is going to be the least helpful, all of it. But maybe you aren’t keen to drop an upwards of $150 to see if you even like the game. So, here’s my second answer which is going to be only marginally more helpful. Wait for a sale and then buy them all.
Okay, okay, if I left it like that this would be the worst buyers guide in history. So, I’m going to go through each DLC to help you understand what it adds and if it sounds important to you personally, and then I’ll give my personal opinion.
However, I need to note something. Every expansion adds new campaign missions, mechs, weapons, sandbox mission types and biomes. I’m not going to go through those aspects because no one wants to sit here for 6 hours. I’m going to hit the larger aspects of the expansions beyond extra variety, which they all add in some way.
Lets start.
Heroes of the Inner Sphere
Heroes of the Inner Sphere adds career mode. While the main campaign is a sandbox, you still have a story to follow, have a set starting area and have to go through the same early tutorial missions whenever you start a new one. Career mode gives you a full sandbox start with several starting years and starting mechs (each DLC also adds new ones if you have HOIS). You don’t follow the main campaigns story, but still have access to DLC campaigns and overall, it’s even more of a sandbox. This is the ideal way to play in my opinion.
Heroes of the Inner Sphere also adds cantinas, these are side missions you pick up that are just simple things like, kill x mech type or collect x item. They grant you rewards but they also unlock an entire upgrade subsystem for you. As you progress through these side missions you unlock upgrades you can pay to add on to your mechs like, increased energy range, faster torso twisting time, improved armor etc. It’s an additional layer you can use to upgrade and customize your mechs with.
Legend of the Kestrel Lancers
This is one is pretty much a variety expansion. It doesn’t add any special mechanics on it’s own. It just adds a bunch of new stuff such as mech variants and what not. All the DLC do this to some extent and I said I wasn’t going to talk about them, but I will note that kestrel lancers does add the megacity biome, allowing you play missions in huge cities.
A Call to Arms
A Call to Arms adds melee weapons to the game and mech variants that utilize them. In the base game you can punch with your mechs but Call to Arms adds weapons like giant swords, claws and axes to the game. I’m not going to lie, coring an enemy mech with the swing of a giant steel weapon is one of the most satisfying things you can do in the game.
The Rise of Rasalhague
The Rise of Rasalhague adds the Rival Mercenary system to the game. Rival Mercs will periodically operate in different areas. If you take on contracts in those areas they may join that mission, either with you or against you. Interacting with these mercs grants you points toward a new progression system with the Bounty Hunter, offering you rewards as you level it up.
The Dragons Gambit
This one is a campaign expansion, its biggest addition is a long 15 mission chain. It adds a couple of other mechs but little else. This makes it the weakest addition in my opinion, even though the quest chain is cool.
Solaris Showdown
Solaris Showdown adds arena missions which is a variety of sandbox mission types you can take in industrial hubs. In addition to money and salvage, climbing the ranks of the arena offers a variety of rewards, much like the bounty hunter. This DLC also pairs well with A Call to Arms, as the arena bouts will feature mechs with melee weapons.
Chaos Reigns
Much like Legend of the Kestrel Lancers, Chaos Reigns is a nicely sized content expansion, but is mostly focused on the clanner era following The Shadow of Kerensky, so more Clan mechs and tech. It does notably add more vehicle types to missions though, and artillery missiles. Speaking of Kerensky, that brings me to…
The DLC The Changed Everything, The Shadow of Kerensky
I have a lot to say about Shadow of Kerensky because it shakes things up the most. Firstly, it adds pilot traits and academies. Pilots can now have special traits, such as being good with specific mechs or weapon types, and you can send them to academies to gain XP and traits. This did the impossible and made me actually care about my pilots. Before that, I never cared when they died, I was more upset about the mech repairs, now I have a reason to actually learn their names.
Next Shadow of Kerensky continues the timeline. Once it hits 3050 the clan invasion begins. If you don’t know much about Battletech lore, that’s fine, I don’t either. But I know the bit that matters. Clanner tech exceeds that of the inner sphere by around 300 years. Their mechs are tougher, faster and more heat resistant, Clan weapons are more powerful and out range the Inner Spheres. It’s the equivalent of fighting the modern military with muskets and cannons.
Now, here’s the thing. We have seen this plot line in hundreds of games. Normally, when it comes to the actual gameplay, you never really feel that disadvantage. I assumed that this would be the same way in Mercenaries. I have never been more wrong in my life. When I first encountered the Clans. I had spent the last several in game years crushing everyone in my way. In my first mission against them I took in my four strongest mechs with top tier weapons, my best pilots and looked forward to acquiring this so-called high tier clan technology for myself.
I came out of that mission with two dead pilots, three completely destroyed mechs and my fourth mech was missing all but one limb. This may be the first time where a game told me I was going against a technologically superior enemy and then made me feel it. It made me feel it deep. Future missions against the clans were of pure survival as I desperately tried to get through them without being bankrupted as my mechs were constantly devastated and my pilots injured or killed. The clans changed the game, I couldn’t fight them the same way I’d been fighting, and hundreds of hours of experience didn’t mean shit.
Salvaging their own weapons and mechs to use against them didn’t tip the scales by much, simply because of how expensive the weapons are and how much it cost to repair clan mechs. Taking clan weapons into missions came with the massive fear of losing them. In this way, the clan invasion was handled in of the most brilliant ways I’d ever seen. So much so, I wish there wasn’t a downside, but there is.
Firstly, fighting the clans is a double-edged sword. You feel like you’re fighting an overwhelmingly superior enemy, and that’s good. But since it follows Mercenaries standard mission logic, it feels ass backwards. How would you fight a foe that is better than you in every way? With superior numbers of course, and I do believe that’s how the Inner Sphere fought back in the lore. By throwing literal tons of mechs at them. But in Mercenaries, it’s your lance of 4 mechs, and sometimes a couple allies against gauntlet after gauntlet of Clanners. It not only feels immersion breaking, but it dials that intensity to frustrating levels, especially with your AI squad mates.
Overcoming a couple of clanner mechs feels like a massive accomplishment, especially when one of their “medium” mechs can run at the speeds of mach fuck while carrying a whopping 16 weapons. At least I think it was 16. It’s difficult to count while screaming and wetting my cockpit. When the game decides to throw an upwards of 20 of those things at me, my victory starts to feel like plot armor, even if said armor has been sheared and shredded while I lay curled up in a pool of tears and urine.
Clanners also changes the feel of the game in a bad way. The long time to kill vanishes, you and the enemy mechs die in an instant, if you don’t delete clanners in the blink of an eye, you violently explode. It starts to feel like Mech Warrior of Duty. If you take your salvaged clan tech back to the inner sphere. You just win, it feels like having a cheat code. It feels like the game is over after that, and if you start in the year 3015 maybe that’s okay. If you start a career in the later years though, it feels far too soon.
My Ending Opinion
If I were to operate under the assumption that you can’t afford all of the DLC right now and don’t want to wait for a sale. I’d go with the base game, Heroes of the Inner Sphere and Solaris Showdown to start with. Heroes of the Inner Sphere gives you access to Career mode and the Cantina missions and upgrade system which are great subsystems. Solaris Showdown gives you Arena Missions which I feel are a critical component because it gives you a way to take contracts and make money in the industrial hubs which puts far less strain, and math on your finances whenever you need to travel to a hub for repairs or shopping.
In the end, MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries, alongside it’s various DLCs makes for a game that’s well worth it in 2026 because it has the potential replay value to make your investment equal pennies on the hour. Especially if you like slower paced games and especially sandboxes the same way that I do. That and, well, the game doesn’t have a lot of competition. Despite its flaws, I haven’t found another game like MechWarrior 5, it’s unique and scratches a specific itch I can’t reach with any other game.
