Review: MECHWARRIOR 5 is a Clunky Disappointment
Piranha Games recently released MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries and the Heroes of the Inner Sphere DLC on the Xbox Series X|S, Steam, and GOG. The game features you piloting BattleMechs as a member of a group of mercenaries. Piranha Games was kind enough to supply me with a review key on the Xbox Series S and I was excited since I last played a MechWarrior game probably about 20 years ago and had fond memories. The review that follows is based on my experience playing the game.
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries finds players in the battlefields of the future, dominated by BattleMechs, hulking machines of war capable of leveling entire cities. As the inheritor of a once-glorious Mercenary company, the quest for glory and revenge will stretch light years, chasing the threads of interstellar intrigue on the journey to become an elite MechWarrior and mercenary commander.
MechWarrior 5 is a game that I’m sure many fans enjoy. Sadly, as a new player, this was a giant mess. The game is from late 2019 and it certainly shows its age in the graphics department. It’s not that the graphics are terrible, but they’re not mind blowing either. The bit of the story that I played through was bland with okay voice acting.
More than anything though, the controls ruin this game for me. I love mechs. However, I want the experience to be smooth. My experience controlling the mechs in this game was extremely clunky. I am sure part of that is to add a sense of realism, but did it need that? It’s a giant freaking mech! It’s okay to not have it feel super clunky. You move with the left analog stick and turn with the right analog stick, but turning doesn’t change how you move which makes it very uncomfortable. I’m having to assume previous titles had a similar control scheme and hope that fans are already familiar with this, but it is not ideal in any way. I have 0 idea how you’re supposed to play this game in first-person perspective with this control scheme either. I’m very glad you can change to third-person view. I also didn’t like that I had to be super on top of where each of my aiming reticles was pointed since it wasn’t always where I thought they’d be pointed. That’s probably due to the fact that you can have different weapons equipped to different parts of the mech, but there were several times where I thought I was aiming at one spot and ended up shooting in another direction. I often ended up staying stationary in battle because that was the only way I could reliably aim, but that means I took massive damage. Not a fun experience.
The controls really hindered my ability to play the game and I only played a couple of missions. This may have impacted my ability to learn more of how to navigate this game, but as far as I got, the tutorial was so barebones that you think you get it, but then navigating menus is never as easy as you think it would be and you end up just hitting buttons until something finally moves.
Another gripe is that the missions weren’t that fun. I know that I only got to do a couple and that’s on me. I’m sure there are some fun missions eventually, but the first few are very dull and center on either defending a base, destroying a base, or just going to a checkpoint and destroying the little tanks and helicopters there. Defending your base can be tricky because moving your mech feels so clunky that I often did a fair amount of damage to my own base just trying to walk to the other side. Destroying a base takes forever unless you just walk over every building in sight and I’ll be honest, I have no idea if that hurts you or not. Fighting small guys like tanks and helicopters is just annoying. I wish that the first mission had a cool mech fight to get me engaged more. I came to this game to fight mechs and it doesn’t happen for a few missions and it’s at the very end when you’re already really damaged because you can’t maneuver very well.
There were some things that I liked though. I like that there are a variety of mechs. I like how you can paint and edit the layout on mechs. The best thing about this game though is the soundtrack. The metal guitar riffs help get you hyped to play the game.
If you enjoy MechWarrior 5, I’m happy for you. If you’re wanting to try out a MechWarrior game, I would not recommend this one unless you’re willing to dedicate a lot of time just learning how to move in this game. Maybe the experience is different with a mouse and keyboard, but I find it really hard in a game like this to actually do anything if my movement is not relative to my camera. Also, the weapons have a really long time between shots that it often felt like I was just standing or moving in the middle of combat instead of fighting. I spent more time fighting the controls than any mechs and that’s very disappointing to me.
