Author:
Jaime Wolf
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Date:
6/29/2024 8:10:13 AM
Subject:
RE: MW5: Mercs
From a single player perspective, it's one of the most infuriatingly designed games in the series, and I've played every single one of them except for MechWarrior Online.
There are two main problems with this game- the biggest offender being that there are no hand crafted missions besides a couple of important story ones, the rest is all auto generated as decided by an algorithm based on a random selection of maps which on paper sounds great as you can have an unlimited number of missions, but in practice is awful because the auto generator is inconsistent at properly doing what it is supposed to be doing while keeping a balanced level of difficulty.
An example: The game builds missions out from a preset pool of possible objectives, one of which is "Go here and stomp on this base until its HP bar is depleted". So you figure why not take a long range mech like an ARC-2W Archer because you're cosplaying as Jaime Wolf and try pelting it from a distance? Turns out you can't do that because while can shoot at the defenders from a distance, for the objective to actually begin you have to pilot your mech into the base and *then* you can start blowing it up. You go in and start blowing it up at close range with your long range mech as that makes a lot of sense, when the auto-gen decides it's time to throw some enemy reinforcements at you to spice things up a bit.
And you might think these reinforcements are gonna come in from the closest edge of the map at a distance and you'll have a chance to pick them off as they run in, but you would be wrong, what's actually going to happen is the game is gonna spawn a dropship right on top of you, drop a trio of King Crabs all loaded with twin linked AC20s and completely demolish your ass faster than you can hit the escape key and press "Exit To Windows."
The second biggest offender is the friendly AI- you can't do anything meaningful with your lance when it is entirely composed of AI pilots, what you've got to work with is "Stay here", "Follow me" and "Attack my target". And their ability to actually follow those commands wildly varies, they might get stuck in terrain, they might assert dominance by sitting in front of the mech they were told to attack and do absolutely nothing, they might literally start running in the opposite direction of where you are going, or my absolute favorite: They'll stand directly in front of you and kindly protect the enemy from your fire. And this is in a game where you have to pay for every single scratch and scrape that your mechs incur, which when driven by AI lancemates, scratch and scrape always turns into "both arms and a leg shot off."
This is, of course, solved by playing co-op with other people where legitimate tactics can then be employed, but I'm of the mind that co-op should never be the solution to any of a game's glaring problems.
I have other, not as severe problems with it, such as the mechlab being too restrictive, the game stuttering badly from time to time, the audio mixing being weird where weapon fire is too quiet compared to everything else, the story being nonexistant, etc etc. But the two aforementioned main problems are what ultimately ruined the game for me. And it really sucks because the core of this game is actually quite fun, as evidenced by the millions of mods attempting to fix it and the people that still play it vehemently despite its problems.
If the reason you're asking is because the game is on sale, then I'd say just go for it, it's not perfect but it's certainly worth ten bucks.
