Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries

I've been plugging along on this game for a while. It's been pretty good stuff so far, though I'm a bit dubious that I'll finish the game. You get in your mechs, do your mission, get have your mechs fixed up, then do another mission. There's an overarching story, but I'm not expecting much. The "high value" missions could barely be called stories at all.

But that's really not the point. The point is to get into big robots and shoot things. Lots of things: other mechs, tanks, turrets, helicopters, buildings, trees, infantry, your lance mates....

The modders are doing a job on the game, too. You can make explosions prettier, flames last longer, and many other things. There's a nice one that improves the AI quite a bit - both your lance's and the enemy's. It's good to see my team do better than me on occasion.

Getting scrap mechs seems a little odd after all my time in BattleTech, where you put pieces together. Unless you put almost all your shares into battle scraps, you won't have enough to get even a mangled mech. If you do go for battle scraps, you're at the mercy of the RNG for what shows up for the battle and whether it shows up as scrap. Even when you do get one, it's busted up bad and will need a lot of repairs. Getting a head kill will mitigate a lot of that, but your lance can't be told to do that. You'll have to send them after other targets or have them hold fire completely while you try to kill a pilot. All in all, it seems better to just take the cash then go on a spending spree to see what you can find.

New expansion coming:

I should have updated this topic!

After the second DLC dropped, I waited a few months, bought both of the DLCs, and tried the campaign again. This time I knew better and went more for cash than salvage. Once I amassed a few million, I saved my game and went on a shopping spree. If I didn't find anything good, I re-loaded and went looking in another direction. A bit cheesy, but it made the game a lot more fun when I was getting mechs I actually wanted instead of trying to make do with whatever my enemies were using.

The story wasn't at all good, as was getting obvious in my first attempt. Those bad men killed my daddy! Now I'm going to kill hundreds of people that had nothing to do with it to take revenge! (The fact that I got exceedingly rich while doing so is just because I need to be rich to have the power to take my revenge.)

The game was plenty good, though. Especially with the DLCs, there's a pretty wide variety of weapons to use and a huge variety of mechs, and that variety really matters. There isn't a great variety of missions but, with all the different kinds of opponents and your own mechs getting upgraded, it's enough to keep most of them interesting. I finished the game wanting more.

Now there's yet another DLC coming out on the 8th! Strangely, there's no video yet. The paid parts of the DLC seem a bit underwhelming: some new, melee focused variants (including the Hatchetman) and melee weapons, three new biomes, an animated skin, and that's it. No new mission types, no new story missions, no new mechanics? That's just not a $15 DLC, IMHO.

The free stuff looks a lot more interesting. They don't give a lot of details, but it looks like some of the most popular mods are getting incorporated. For instance, right now the vanilla game has a hard limit on mech weight. If the limit is 200 tons and you've got four 50-ton mechs, you're good. If you've got three 50-ton mechs and one 55-ton mech, you can't do the mission. You'll need to replace one of the mechs with something else. Given your limited storage space and the cost of maintaining these mechs, you're likely to have to give up quite a few tons. With the update, you should be able to go in with 205 tons and a (small?) penalty to your pay.

Anyway, good game. Not looking forward to the new DLC but I am looking forward to the free update that comes along with it.

And yet ANOTHER DLC is coming out for this game that I thought was finished:

I guess their new business model is to keep improving the game and releasing very-much-optional DLC alongside the updates to fund them. I haven't heard any rumors about a MW6, so maybe it's going to be a DLC every three quarters for eternity?