After a long nineteen-year wait, the MechWarrior series will finally get another entry with MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries. A huge graphical jump is welcome for the series, as the last big mech game that wasn’t Titanfall was the widely-panned Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor for Kinect. This return to the genre is a big risk taken by developer Piranha Games, who have a track record of MechWarrior Online, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, and Duke Nukem Forever.

It’s hard to make a mech game with bad controls and, thankfully, MW5 retains the tight, expansive controls of the previous entries in the series. Moving around is quite similar to “tank controls” but players can take control of the mech’s feet by centering them with the F key. Going forward and backward is akin to driving a car, where pressing W and S control how quickly the mech moves in either direction, and does not necessitate the player to keep the key held down to move, so they can focus on the combat. There are even throttle percentages bound to the Numpad.

Movement in the sections between the missions, though? That is another story. This is a chore, as players must hold down the sprint key to move at a reasonable pace, with no option available to switch to hold to sprint. In the base I spent my time in, I traversed the environment slowly but surely, eventually testing to see if there was fall damage for a 100-foot drop. There was not. On top of that, the player cannot see their legs when they look down in the locked first person, something that has been implemented in games since the last MechWarrior game came out.

In addition to the wonky movement in your base, the characters you interact with are expressionless and show no emotion in their words. The lip sync is also nonexistent, removing any chance of the game being immersive. I also attempted to pause several times during dialogue, and the dialogue would continue in the pause menu, leaving the characters to keep moving their mouths to no sound upon unpausing. On top of this, subtitles are mandatory, with no option to remove them. The one bit of respite is hearing one of my favorite voice actors, Elias Toufexis (best known as Adam Jensen from Deus Ex) put on a solid performance as a side character.

Aside from the atrocious mid-level scenes, getting into levels is a whole different story. I installed MechWarrior 5 on my 7200RPM HDD, as I didn’t imagine a game of this stature to be too demanding. I was wrong. To load the tutorial, I had to wait two and a half minutes to load fifteen minutes of gameplay. This is obscene and was seen earlier this year with Anthem. I cannot attest to how quickly this game loads on solid-state drives, but this is unacceptable in 2019.

Regardless of the time spent away from the mech, when you finally get to work with your mech, things get better. There is immense depth in mech customization, with a full RGB menu to add flair to your rides, and a deep repair system to ensure you can use different types of mechs for different missions. Personalizing your mech is rewarding and a nice respite between stressful missions.

There are a wide variety of missions to select through the star map, which is a humongous galaxy map with hundreds of worlds visible. This is more Mass Effect than No Man’s Sky, though, as you are limited in where you can travel. Traversing to the conflict zones in red are the key places to go for the best bang-for-your-buck contracts. Contracts differ from campaign missions, as they serve to buff your mechs and prepare repairs.

While I am cognizant of its shortcomings, I am pained to write this review, as I know that, with more polish, MechWarrior 5 could be a stellar game. Considering the game as a full package is key to getting full enjoyment out of it, and while I can sing the praises of the mech sections, I have to shine a light on how messy the non-mech sections are. If you can overlook the segments of the game where you aren’t a pilot, then you will enjoy MechWarrior 5‘s gripping combat, but, past that, it is the black sheep of the series, and a drastic step down in quality.

A PC review copy of MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries was provided by Piranha Games for this review.

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MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries

$49.99

4.5

Score

4.5/10

Pros

• Strong Mech Combat
• Decent Story

Cons

• Unreal Load Times
• Riddled with Bugs
• Lack of Immersion