Mechwarrior 5: Legend of the Kestrel Lancers
It is 2013 and I am a college student playing Mechwarrior Online, a giant robot game set in the Battletech universe. I’m striding across the landscape in fifty-five tons of steel, unleashing barrage after barrage upon the enemy - but my Shadow Hawk crumbles around me as I take returning fire. My SRMs and lasers are melted to slag, and I’m down to just my Autocannon/10 - but the enemy mech’s torso armor is stripped. I pivot and ‘core the enemy mech with a single shot. It’s a fun game, but I remember thinking to myself that Mechwarrior Online would’ve been elevated from good to great if not for all the freemium jank that surrounded it. If only they would release a new singleplayer Mechwarrior game, I thought.
The year is 2022 and I’m at the upscale closing event for a funeral. While standing around, I notice my distant relative’s choice of attire - a (no doubt prized) Battletech graphic t-shirt and a (certainly chosen with much thought) pair of cargo shorts. We crossed paths at the end of the brunch and I asked him what he thought of the relatively-new single player Mechwarrior game, Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries, while gesturing to his shirt. He responded that he didn’t play any of the video games - he only collected the models. The conversation died almost instantly after that, but I was reminded that I had liked 2013’s Mechwarrior Online and loved 2018’s Battletech, and so I bought Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries upon returning home.
Any feeling of excitement I possessed were, however, immediately tempered when I was treated to one of the most ineptly-made opening cutscenes I’ve ever had the displeasure of witnessing. Badly edited, severely compressed, questionably acted, and featuring pacing I can only describe as ‘surreal’ - it was an ill omen for what was to come. Make no mistake: there’s a fun video game somewhere under here, and that game kept me coming back - it’s just all the parasitic elements that sour the experience. Not unlike my experiences with Mechwarrior Online, strangely.
Each mission in Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries involves sending four of your mechs onto the battlefield, one under your control, three under the command of friendly AIs. Now, and this is important - every idle nick of the paint job to any one of these four mechs is going to mean a repair bill later. As such, it’s important to fight as efficiently as possible - don’t expose yourself to too many enemies at once, identify what weapons on the battlefield pose the most danger to you (focus on the knife, not the hand that holds it, etc etc: a light mech with a high-caliber autocannon is much more dangerous than an assault mech armed with nothing but small lasers), and engage the enemy in such a way where you can maximize the effectiveness of your armament while minimizing and disabling their’s.
Now, this is all good advice for you, the player, but what about the friendly AI that commands the other 3/4ths of your firepower - do they take such tactics into account? The answer is ‘not even slightly’. The AI is programmed to run at the enemy until they are in the effective range of their shortest weapon (equipped with a railgun and one small laser? Time to enter knife-fighting range!) and then be torn to shreds while you watch, your brain left mentally tallying up the damage actively being done in front of your eyes. Interesting tactics, like using a Locust to scout while an Archer pounds the foe from a distance, are unworkable here because the AI is incapable of doing much beyond pathing to the enemy and shooting. Some mechs have jump jets, but the AI has no idea how to use them and they’re just wasted tonnage on any mech they’re on. You can give your AI allies orders, but they’re limited to simple callouts like ‘attack this target’ and ‘stand here’, with no way to tell them to ‘skirmish’ or ‘stay back’ or ‘attack from range’. There is co-op where your friends with the game can jump into your campaign, and that might actually be really fun and workable! If you don’t have three friends who love Battletech, however, that’s not going to be an option! You will have a bad time!
The campaign is free-form, allowing you to roam the galaxy as the leader of a mercenary company, which sounds great, like, conceptually, but actually it’s kind of an unfun slog. It sort of reminds me of Elite: Dangerous in that you’re doing a lot of cookie-cutter missions across a samey galaxy to get more cash and Rep for factions that feel like they should be distinct but really aren’t. The carrot is that you get bigger, stompier mechs and guns and each Rep level lets you advance the story further. That said, advancing the story is also a real damn grind - each mission offers precious little Rep rewards, so expect to do dozens of samey mercenary missions between story missions. At least the story is worth it, right?
It is at this point I must inform you that the staggeringly bland, borderline inept, writing of the intro cutscene manifests itself in the main campaign story. You are COMMANDER MASON. His father is DEAD, killed by a SINISTER MERCENARY COMPANY during the poorly-edited opening cutscene - but the death of your father was also KIND OF YOUR FAULT. Does Mason feel at all broken up about this? NO. He is a HARD, BLAND MAN, here to make the HARD, BLAND DECISIONS. You’re not alone, though, because Elias Toufexis, the guy who played Adam Jensen in Deus Ex: Human Revolution is here, but his character has even less personality than you do.
The thing this game needs isn’t an open ended shuffling around the galaxy, but an Ace Combat-style campaign of linear missions where you get to be a small part of a much larger war, don’t need to worry about repair bills nearly as much, and spend your time engaged with a unique suite of handcrafted missions, each putting a somewhat different spin of the core formula, while colorful characters chatter and scream on the radio.
Now, this is a list of games I completed in 2022. I did not finish Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries’ story because I didn’t want to. As such, this is not a review of Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries. THIS IS A REVIEW OF MECHWARRIOR 5’s DLC: MECHWARRIOR 5: LEGEND OF THE KESTREL LANCERS, WHICH I PURCHASED AFTER I PLAYED QUITE A LOT OF MECHWARRIOR 5, FIRST, AND WAS DESPERATE FOR QUALITY CONTENT. This DLC’s central addition is a 14 mission linear campaign which is remarkable for actually being pretty decent (including a perfectly legible intro cutscene! Rendered in HD! Nice!) and giving a strong feeling of stakes and scale to the whole affair. The expansion also adds some new weapons and biomes, like a small cityscape area that’s pretty neat. However, the DLC is not standalone, you’ll need the base game, and it starts, like, six years after the start of the campaign, meaning that you’ll need to start a game and then play for six in game years, which is a long time (though you can skip right to it if you own the Heroes of the Inner Sphere DLC).
But what if there was a game set in the Battletech universe that allowed you to exert granular control over each of your mechs, ensuring that any damage to them would be truly your fault? A game where things like scouting and tactics mattered? A game that didn’t require you to grind for hours between story missions? A game whose story was actually pretty fun, featuring a likable cast of characters?
Well, fuckers, that game exists and it’s 2018’s Battletech. That’s right - this list extols the virtues of not just one, but two giant robot tactics games with great stories. Made by the same folks who did Shadowrun Returns, Battletech is mechanically the same game as Mechwarrior, except turn based, which, since that’s where the Battletech series originated, is a much better fit for these mechs/systems/weapons.
The Bottom Line
You really need three friends who also own this game to make it a genuinely good time. Maybe Mechwarrior 6 will be good when it comes out in 2030. Perhaps that one will have built-in VR support, too.