Mechwarrior Mercenaries 5: Single player inside!

Don’t let the thread dissuade you. It’s still giant robots smashing through buildings and shooting missiles. Just don’t over analyze it and blow stuff up.

I’m the opposite and the recent thread activity has me wanting to play it again. I did just fire up MWO last weekend for a few matches so maybe it’s that. :)

Just to reiterate… look into the mods, they help tremendously.

Are the legs in this game particularly strong? I find them the main weakpoint - my working theory on why I can outlast 3-5 lances against with a single one is mainly that you can take out mechs so fast by blowing out both legs with focus fire as the player, whereas the AI tends to spread it more around - I think they rather focus more on taking out your weapon arm. I was constantly replacing the arms the two medium lasers mounted there on my hunchbacks, and usually heading home from Warzone missions when my AC/20 ammo ran out. Interested in trying the Hunchback variant that mounts lasers now that I finally salvaged one, that might last longer, but I’m also unfortunately outgrowing the 50 tonners now that the drop weight is way above 200. I love the design of the Warhammer but I’m wary of the arm mounted PPCs since I’ve lost so many arms in lighter mechs…

Also want to clarify I mean stompiest FPS as praise. I may wish for it to be even more stompy (most of my wishes are for EVEN MOAAAR) but it’s great. The melee they just added makes it even more fun to demolish buildings in those missions where I basically do half the demolition by barreling through the buildings, barreling through the walls while the folks are yelling on the comms about everything getting blown up. I felt they totally underutilised that bit actually, I want to spend even more time tearing through cities and forests in firefights, they should have put destructible environment everywhere!

Although maybe that would render the leg destruction strategy non-viable if there was tons of leg cover. I kinda like the idea of a cover shooter where you take cover by walking/driving into a building/destructible terrain and you’re constantly blowing up cover.

EDIT: Also remember it’s $1 for a month if you don’t have GamePass and you just want to try it out.

Nice! That’s how it should be! That sounds fun. Ok, you’ve convinced me. This game sounds great.

I really hated how in Mech4 they made the legs the hardest thing to take out.

Did the tutorial and first mission and so far it’s meeting, possibly even exceeding my expectations! Perhaps it’s a good thing that I didn’t experience previous entries in the series, but the “feel” of the 'mech so far is really impressing me.

Preach.

Very much this. Don’t be dissuaded by the grumbling of old timers. The game as it is is fine.

The new game has legs much tougher than in mw4, I think.

In mw4, if you lost one leg, your mech was immobilized if I recall.

In mw4, losing one leg would put you into gimp mode, but you could still move. However, further damage to the missing leg would transfer directly to the internals of the other leg, making destroying both legs reasonably easy, which would then kill the mech.

In mw4, I believe, they removed this damage transfer, so dead legs become shields.

Dear god, so much this. I’ve done a few more missions now and those fliers are the bane of my life. If they get above you, you’re fucked. I’ve quickly developed a habit of watching the scanner closely for the first possible sign of fliers, and concentrate on them to the exclusion of all else.

Still the best, with up to 50 players on the server (although only 8 in a single battle/match) at once.

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In MW5, depleting armour in a leg hobbles the mech - makes it move slower (but you’re not immobilised) and has a limping animation. Further damage goes to on that leg will go that side torso (or the center torso if that side is gone). Losing both legs will incapacitate the mech, so you want to focus the other leg once the first one is “broken”.

Hmmm, I was searching for more info but oddly there’s not much details on this - there’s mention that transferred damage might be reduced since there’s apparently some of that in MWO. For some reason I assumed it worked like ammo explosions with the damage trickling through via the internals but haven’t watched the indicators closely enough to tell - I’m usually trying to watch for the indication that I’m hitting the other leg.

EDIT: It does look like the heavy limping is only temporary and then it’s a minor speed loss? The speed loss looks like less than 50% in my own mechs when I’m missing a leg (more like…20%?), but I notice the limping a lot when I’m targeting enemies because that helps sooo much in slowing down all those fast light mechs.

Currently mostly annoyed at the salvage drop rates - why are there never enough salvage shares and/or all those mechs I don’t have are not dropping as salvage. I’d like to start collecting some heavier mechs!! Maybe I should just switch to going all-in on the C-bills and look for them in shops instead.

The DLCs improved the game quite a bit. In particular the kestrel lancers campaign is well done.

It’s nothing that rises to the level MW3 but it’s a good effort, and the graphics and sound design and the stompiness are still very satisfying.

Arise Robot!

Saw this 30% off right now and a friend bought it.

That raised the question in my mind: is coop any good in this because I could be convinced to fire it up with him and run thru the campaign together if so.

I found coop very enjoyable, though it’s mostly just a second person along for the ride with limited agency in choices overall.

I bet this is great fun with a buddy and an open comms line. It’s also on Xbox game pass, and plays pretty dang good on the box.

I played it on my Series X last weekend. Now, the first Mech you get is some tiny little speedster Mech, but it felt too much in the middle. Not fast enough to work as a third/fist person shooter, but not slow enough to feel like you were in a big Mech. At least not using that initial Mech and during the first missions I did with it. I might give it more time later though as it wasn’t horrible or anything. Just not super engaging during the first few hours.

Jumped into coop with a friend just now and we got wrecked, neither of us much know what’s going on other than we brought a knife to a gun fight (pretty sure it was lights on our end mediums ganging up on us for AI side).

Which prompted me to circle back and ask for those who have played this coop, did you get a solid Lance together in SP and then play coop so you could field the right hardware for the job?

Because this was the first mission you can play coop, like mission 3 or something, and we were not even close to ready for what we encountered.

Note also: not a high level of competence playing this, got hundreds of hours in Battletech, but that’s a whole different thing.

I bounced off of this several times, despite being a long-time BT fan and having played all the other MW games (and MWO). I always wound up with a bunch of broken 'Mechs and no way to fix them.

So far that’s what’s happening to us, chewed up mechs that cost more to fix than we made taking the mission. We’ve parked the coop to see if we can make progress in SP and get a lance together that’s not just lights because that’s clearly not working.

It puzzles me why a game designer doesn’t include difficulty levels in a game like this. Even just two would have been nice. It’s no more complicated than reducing the enemy numbers because it’s pretty apparent even from my limited time with it the devs only way of making the AI function as an adversary is spamming superior numbers at you.

But then maybe that’s just a thing with mech games, because Battletech routinely even in the earliest stages of the campaign threw 3 to 1 odds at you. And that was just the first wave on a mission.

You should have more than enough money to repair, though failing missions outright can be pretty dire early on. I usually put my negotiation points toward salvage rather than payment, but a thing you can also do is put negotiation points into damage coverage which should help with repair costs.

Make sure you are in a conflict zone with mission appropriate to your rep level and mechs. Try to hit planets with several missions so you aren’t wasting a lot of money on travel early on.

Thanks for the tips, I’ll be diving back in to figure it out for sure. It’s fun to stomp around in mechs FPS style.

The initial shock was from jumping into a coop game and getting utterly destroyed because the mission choices we had were both way too difficult for what we were fielding.