Sparks fly from the shattered remnants of my mech’s left arm, blown off by a lucky missile strike as I tried to juke and dodge in close combat. The charred tubing juts out of my burnt stump, smoking and hissing. There’s no time to mourn the loss of my limb and its mounted autocannon though as a laser blast blazes past my face, charring the paint on the side of my mech’s head. I swivel forward but a cross-blast almost gets me. I leave my legs facing the enemy and shift my torso over 90 degrees to the right to blast a straggling tank who’s trying to take out my side armor. Mistake. My instruments all shiver with an electrical surge, visuals disrupted as an electric blast sears the left half of my torso. I lash back with a burst from my autocannon and blow the enemy’s right arm off, freeing me up to tear him apart limb from limb, targeting one weapons bundle after another until he’s stumbling away in a flaming ruin. One final shot to the pilot’s cage and he’s down, toppling to the ground and exploding. Victory is mine, but I’m barely in one piece, a shambling ruin of the battlemech I was a scant thirty minutes ago.
This is Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries from Piranha Games. Vicious, grueling, and intense, Mechwarrior 5 epitomizes what a real-time mech game should be. From the story/tutorial introduction, every step you take is a challenge. You take on all attackers, land and air, and simply try to stay alive, often by the skin of your teeth, to survive to fight anew and crawl your way bleeding up through the ranks of mercenary forces. While rather light on plot, the meat of the game definitely makes up for it.
Make no mistake, Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries isn’t for the weak-hearted. It challenges you from the get-go, giving you fast and underpowered mechs against smaller enemies and then suddenly throwing out more and more powerful enemies, testing the strength of your skills and tactics against a variety of terrains and opponents. Each level is a grinding uphill battle, made more so by the simple fact that you can’t save during a combat mission at all. That’s right, you screw up, you live with the consequences or die. Starting over isn’t really an option most of the time and even when all seems lost, sometimes you can manage to survive one last-ditch thrust at the enemy forces.
Now, I have two things to admit. One, I took way too long playing Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries, partly because of technical issues with my computer (which apparently needed some serious driver updates) that made the game crash repeatedly. This is a high-powered game that looks fantastic but definitely demands the resources to match its gorgeous visuals. The other is that I’m a huge fan of FASA Corporation and the Battletech world. FASA made Battletech from the mid-eighties on and also made one of my other favorite older properties, Shadowrun. Battletech has spun off the wildly successful Mechwarrior games as well as cartoons, a fantastic collectible card game, pen & paper RPGs, and over a hundred novels, but this is the first Mechwarrior in almost 20 years and it’s a return to form with a plethora of modern updates making it significantly more playable and approachable. FASA eventually sold off the rights to both Shadowrun and Battletech, but they’ll always be FASA Corporation products in spirit, even if Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries is made by Piranha Games and owned by Microsoft these days.
Speaking of playability, I highly recommend that you complete the tutorials as they set up not only how to use all the hotkeys effectively, but also the beginning of the storyline as well. Mechwarrior 5 takes place in a highly fleshed-out universe far in the future where combat is primarily with armies of mercenaries using mechs as proxies for rival factions that control whole sectors of the galaxy. It’s a fascinating world with so much depth that it’s honestly hard to jump in to due to the sheer volume of content out there. Suffice it to say that if you’re interested in mech-based war stories, Battletech and Mechwarrior will give you your fill for literally years to come. Sadly, not a lot of that depth actually makes it into the main campaign’s plotline. There’s a story, but it’s nothing special, and the fairly recent Battletech tactical game which I reviewed here is significantly better in terms of writing.
But let’s get back to the gameplay itself. Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries is a challenge. I don’t say that lightly either. Think the mech version of Dark Souls, where enemies are relentless, strategies only work with practice, and nothing is purely intuitive, but you eventually get a feel for it. Hotkey placement is excellent and the tutorial goes a long way towards explaining how to play, but you’re still going to die a fair bit. The first few missions took me 2-3 tries each before I really got a feel for the way each mech worked, and then it was off to the races with a different one. Then you’re changing loadouts, rebinding firing hotkeys, controlling the phalanx of mechs under your command and so much more. This is a complex action game that’s also as much simulation as anything else, not only during combat but in the lulls between battles too. Wandering about the home base of your company makes Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries feel almost comfortable with its focused attention to detail, even in things as small as the bonsai you’re cultivating in your office.
Missions are varied and well-designed and after a while, you’ll find that they boil down into categories such as defense, obliteration, and raiding sorties. All of them have pros and cons, and as you upgrade and unlock sections of the map, you’ll find yourself travelling all about the galaxy, building your mercenary forces, engaging in all sorts of battles, and likely completing a story segment or two here and there. The real charm in Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries is the combat and it absolutely has it in spades. Piranha Studios has created a powerhouse of a game here that draws you in with resource management and mech balancing becoming surprisingly enjoyable. It’s not often I find a game that incorporates these concepts and actually manages to make me enjoy them. I was honestly concerned about the weight restrictions on my mechs and how to get the most firepower for my weight without sacrificing my speed and versatility in my lance groups. That’s the mark of a well-designed play experience.
Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries is, as one might expect, graphically outstanding. It’s a visual feast with a lot of attention paid to small details. Footprints and tread marks in the snow, battle scoring on the body of your mech, fantastic smoke and fire effects. I was particularly surprised when I was traipsing through a light forest in an early mission and encountered a group of light tanks. I opened fire with my lasers in a stand of trees and spun around tracking the tank. My lasers got him, but they also seared through a stand of trees, catching them on fire, burning the path of my lasers like a swath through the forest, toppling a whole patch of trees. Stomping through areas has similar effect on the buildings and background landscape. The details create a cumulative impression of how heavy and powerful your mechs are and really makes you feel like you’re stomping around in a giant fifty ton robot. Every new environment was a treat and I found myself waiting to catch the next little detail that added even more realism to the planets I visited.
Audio had similar detail and depth and I really enjoyed turning up the speakers on this one. The music dovetailed well into the game and kicked into high gear in intensive scenes, creating an added layer of tension. Sound effects were well executed and with even a low to mid-range 5.1 system, Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries’ audio is quite immersive. Between the graphics and sound, it’s a win all around. In fact, it’s hard to find fault with anything in Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries except for the storyline, which is, um, fairly uninispired. I’m actually a bit disappointed there because there are literally over a hundred Battletech books out there, not to mention countless sourcebooks, fan fiction, and much more, and there should be no way you couldn’t write a better story than this. Almost anyone could. On a separate note, I also feel that paint could have played a better role in this particular game. It would have been amazing to have to strategically paint your mech to camouflage it for the various terrains you encounter, especially when there’s repair lead time between every mission and the game takes place over literally years. I tended to use brightly colored mechs because they were easier to track on screen, but tactically, that’s an absolute rubbish strategy as every enemy would have been able to see me coming a mile away.
Regardless, Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries is more than a competent mech game, and more than just a sequel that’s a couple decades late. It’s one of the best overall mech simulations I’ve ever played, and it’s fun as hell. More than once, I ended up having to take a break after a particularly challenging mission as my mouse arm was literally cramping from the tension I hadn’t realized I was holding in it. I was utterly absorbed in every combat, sucked right into the thick of battle, raging at my mistakes and basking in my triumphs. Not many simulation-style games truly suck you in like this and it’s a refreshing change. I want to be waiting for the next chance I get to play a game, looking at the clock thinking that I can play in a couple more hours. Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries delivers that. At $50 for the standard edition and $60 for the digital deluxe, you’re paying for a AAA title and unless you’re looking for an epic sci-fi plot, you get what you paid for. Clocking in at around 30 hours or so, depending on how much you want to wander about the galaxy, it’s not a short trek either. You can spend a long time just running missions and skipping the main story, or you can rush straight through, it’s all up to you, which is the beauty of Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries. Chances are you’re just going to want to get back down to another planet so you can raise some hell though. So get to it!
This review was based on a digital copy of Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries. It is a timed exclusive with the Epic Store and not available on any other platforms currently. It was played on an I7-8700K with 16 GB of DDR4-3000 RAM, an Asus GeForce GTX 1080 ROG Strix graphics card. The images from this review are from the official website for the game. My apologies for the photos, as I did have some issues with my system and ended up unable to take screenshots so I was forced to use press shots exclusively.