MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries Review: The Continuing Adventures of Captain Beef Hardcheese

Everything old is new again and just in time for the grimdark world of 2020, we have ourselves a Mechwarrior game. If you’re confused, the other game that came out not too long ago was Battletech, and that was similar but was more of a tactics-style game. Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries is a revival of the Mechwarrior franchise from the 1990s and 2000s puts you in the commander’s seat of a 30-foot tall walking death machine. It’s less about tactics and more about shooting the hell out of things.

MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries
Developer: Piranha Games
Price: $50 USD
Platform: PC via Epic Games Store
MonsterVine was supplied with Epic Game Store code for review

The retro feel is infused throughout the game, not always to its benefit. The opening cutscene is VERY extreme hardcore 1990s. It sounds like they dug up Don LaFontaine (the Movie Trailer Voice Guy) to read the narration. IN THE FUTURE, HUMANITY IS COOL! BUT THEN THINGS STARTED TO SUCK! MECHWARRIORS! (Wailing guitar solos here).

The opening tutorial/cinematic combines hilariously bad 90s game writing–things like “I THINK THE BASE IS UNDER ATTACK!” as bombers drop a line of bombs on it–with an adequate tutorial. By the way, you are YOUR DAD’S SON. AND HIS ONLY SON. AND HE DIES SAVING YOU. IT HAS TO BE IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE THEY MENTION IT SEVERAL TIMES. ALSO YOU HAVE A CRANKY ENGLISH MECHANIC THAT’S THE BEST. SORRY FOR SHOUTING THAT’S JUST HOW THE GAME IS ABOUT ITS STORY. Your name is something like COMMANDER JACK MASON or CAPTAIN BEEF HARDCHEESE or ADMIRAL SLAPPY PORKSLAB. Because of course, it is.

After a little while, you’re done with the Daddy Issues intro, and the actual game part is pretty decent. If you haven’t played an actual Mechwarrior game before, Mechs handle like semi-trucks. You build up momentum and plan your turns. They feel big and bulky and heavy. But it is satisfying to stomp through a town and plow through a skyscraper. City combat can feel like a kaiju battle with these giant behemoths tearing through skyscrapers as they try to kill each other, or firing a blast of lasers through an industrial area to kill a lurking tank.

In-game is where that weird retro-ness starts to appear. Most of the mechs, even the heavy ones, are relatively fragile. While you CAN go crashing through a building in a mano-a-mano duel to the death, it can seriously damage your mech. So you wind up inching forward, waiting for enemies to spawn a few at a time, then taking them out. Likewise, in missions where you attack an enemy base, it’s usually wiser to find a spot far away and carefully plink away rather than charging in, guns blazing. Even if you commit to maximum destruction, sometimes your mech can plow through an entire building and sometimes a shin-high wall stops it in its tracks, like the universe is full of Donald Trumps dedicated to building big, beautiful walls.

Another somewhat retro choice is the complete lack of mid-mission repair or replacement options (at least that I found). Again, it’s true to the genre that you’re way out there on your own and if you screw up, you’re hosed. However, from a game perspective, it’s not a whole lot of fun to realize you’re a third of the way through the mission and you may as well start over because there’s nothing you can do to make a run at it.

It is, admittedly, somewhat true to the IP that mechs are walking weapons of incredible power but also have their vulnerabilities. From a gameplay perspective, it’s pretty disappointing that the best way to use your incredibly destructive weapon is slowly and carefully. It’s like a driving sim where you get the keys to a Lambo but can only drive 55 and obey all the traffic laws.

A puzzling omission is melee combat. Get in close with an enemy mech and you’ll just…bump around like teens on the dance floor trying to cop a feel without getting caught. There’s no option to punch or kick, even when a mech has hands or claws or feet. I’m not asking for Fight Night 3015 here. I just want to kick a robot in the jimmy or bust out the chainsaw dick. You CAN stomp on smaller vehicles, which is extremely satisfying, but it can also substantially damage your mech.

And that damage is something you have to manage even if you survive the mission. The meta part of the game puts WALL BEEFSTEAK in charge of his daddy’s mercenary company, so you’re always riding the tight margin between profit and despair. Getting your mechs beat up is a good way to go broke. As TRUNK SLAMCHEST moves out into the world, he can also add pilots to the roster and eventually build out a nice little squad…but they also have to be equipped and their vehicles maintained. You may fight for salvage and interesting mech parts in lieu of some cash, but you’re still going to have to get all that damage fixed.

It can be an interesting part of the game to balance who goes, what they drive, and how they’re armed, but it can also wind up hurting you pretty badly when a mission goes sideways or the salvage sucks. Sometimes you can wind up in an XCOM-style death spiral where your crew keeps getting beat up, so you have to take more dangerous missions with higher pay, but then they get beat up even more.

While the companion AI is okay, it isn’t great. Once you build out your crew, you have some backup, but they tend to blunder around like overgrown children and crash into things. Fortunately, this extends to the enemy. Watching a small enemy tank do a Dukes of Hazzard jump over a random snowbank trying to avoid you is pretty funny, but it’s less funny when it’s your buddy blundering through a building and taking a ton of damage or getting hung up on a wall when you need gunfire support. MechWarrior giveth and Mechwarrior taketh away.

On the management side, the past-game weirdness rears its head again with what I called roleplaying. Mechwarrior 5 loves first-person and thinks you’ll love it too, so it usually dumps you into first-person at any available opportunity even when it’s usually better to be in third-person since your in-mech view might be a square looking directly ahead and your third-person view might be a 180-degree near-panorama with excellent situational awareness. This even extends into the management side, where after a mission, you’re dumped into the Mech Bay.

Now, some people may enjoy physically going from console to console and repairing their mechs, then climbing up a ladder to the command room literally every time they complete a mission, then browsing missions and talking to NPCs there. The game sure is eager to get you to do it. But by hitting TAB, you can do pretty much everything without wandering all over the ship. So why does it exist?

It’s a question you’ll be asking a fair amount if you’re somewhat older or used to games from 20 years ago. The combat is fun, but not as fun as it could be. Stomping around in a giant tank is great, but stomp too much and the game punishes you for it. There’s instant action and co-op (talk about a throwback), which is great, but the campaign clearly got most of the love. It’s a jumble of fun game and some questionable design choices.

The Final Word
A thoroughly decent-to-good mech game with some weird design choices and a not-always-good retro feel.

– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair