Played a bit of this last night, through the tutorial and the first campaign mission. It feels good, if a little clunky in places.
The Good:
- It's pleasantly stompy and simulation-y. Feels a bit less arcade than MW4, but not quite as granular are MW2/3. There's a difference in feel between Light and Medium mechs at the very least. Haven't yet tried anything larger. The control scheme is fairly intuitive (though I'm pretty well practiced) as well.
- Weapons all seem to work like how you expect them to, though I haven't used everything out there yet (no PPCs or LBX autocannons if those exist). Lasers linger for a bit, adding some benefit to aiming skill, while your autocannons are delightfully punchy.
- Every mission has a fairly large set of stats, all visible before drop, which does seem to affect a number of both aesthetic and gameplay traits. Frozen worlds feel cold and stark, and so on. Your cockpt glass even gets little bits of frost on the edges.
- Paint jobs are fairly varied and allow for a decent amount of customization. These paint jobs, unlike in MWO, are very visible in-game, both in the mech lab and out in the field.
- I've kinda hit on this with prior points, but the whole game feels dedicated to a feel of immersion. The inside of each mech cockpit is noticeably different so far and draw you into the world, especially when explosions and lasers are reflecting light inside the pit. The mechs scale accurately and even Light mechs are massive when you're walking around at their feet in the mech bay.
- The voice acting is actually pretty good, so far. Not every line is delivered with cinematic gusto, but nothing has been terrible, which is nice. Some of the voice acting actually manages to reach from good to great.
- I haven't look at the tools yet, but modding support seems to be in right out of the gate. I expect we'll be seeing a lot of cool stuff in that realm fairly quickly.
The Meh:
- The graphics are not modern by any standards. This isn't something that bothers me too much, and it doesn't look bad, but don't go in expecting photorealism for sure. I do also notice that it seems... blurry? Pixelated in a weird way, at the same time, as well. I've fiddled with all the graphics options and nothing quite seems to help: changing the resolution, scale, and sharpness filter doesn't seem to affect it much. It's more annoying than terrible, though.
- The story, thus far, is largely forgettable. It's serviceable. It's accurate to the lore (actually, add respecting the lore to the Good section). It's not egregious in any way. But it's not up to the level of any of the better Battletech novels by any means. Granted, I'm not far in, so maybe it delves into stuff more as we go.
- Enemy AI so far isn't anything special. Again, early into the campaign. But so far it's been nothing but tanks and vtols pathing fairly randomly. Seems to be more a matter of quantity over quality. It's not the worst thing ever, but I am expecting that complex tactics aren't going to factor in. Again, it's fine, but you might find it disappointing.
- Loading times can get kinda long. I have a ton of ram and a good HDD, so I imagine the levels are just large. It can go for a couple minutes depending on the mission, it seems.
- Lastly, the terrain/building destruction just feels weird. Buildings, trees, rocks, etc. all feel like they're paper mache and it seems a bit arbitrary whether you can walk through any given obstruction or not, and whether you'll be damaged. I would honestly have preferred weapon-only destruction or to have it be limited to small objects, but I get the appeal.
- This is just a personal thing, but I really wish you could scan more things. I miss being able to manually target buildings to see what was inside. I don't think this has been a thing at all since MW3, and even then it was more limited than MW2's (frankly amazing) level of detail.
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Overall, I haven't run into anything particularly bad, and the good is actually pretty solid. I'm enjoying myself and can't wait to wrap up work today and get back into the game.
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Topic: MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries: In Production (Read 14439 times)