Or maybe a lot broken, depending on who you ask in the community. That’s because MechWarrior 5 is a little broken. Why worry about a battle if you can start from the beginning of that skirmish at any time?īut MechWarrior 5 would be unplayable without the restart button.

In fact, that button kind of flies in the face of what games of this nature do well, which is build stakes.

It’s not a design that should lend itself to a “restart” button. Failure isn’t the end it’s just another wrinkle in your campaign. Having to rebuild your lance after a mission goes bad is part of the drama, and having your entire career ended by bankruptcy if you don’t manage your resources well across multiple missions is a feature of the game. While it’s not quite as twitchy as Spelunky or capricious as FTL: Faster Than Light, you’re meant to make a run at the whole story, carrying over both losses and wins from each battle. Thematically, MechWarrior 5 is structured as a roguelike. This makes it easier to avoid accidentally falling off a cliff, or into a lava flow in the heat of battle.īut my favorite button in the game is a very taboo button indeed. There’s even a button to make sure that your legs are lined up with your torso, which forces you to look in the same direction in which you’re moving. There are buttons for lasers, buttons for missiles, buttons to issue orders to your lance, and buttons to move your ’Mech. There’s a lot to keep track of inside your ’Mech, and a lot of buttons that control the various systems. The game can be played in third-person mode to get a better sense of your surroundings, but you can also get right inside the cockpit by playing in the first-person view. You and up to three allies - which comprise a “lance” in the series’ vernacular - are bristling with exotic weapons, and only by working together can you take down the dozens of enemies aligned against you in each mission. The arcade-style simulation game is about flinging yourself into battle inside a building-sized walking tank. MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is a game about big stompy robots and, like every other big stompy robot game that has come before it, MechWarrior 5 requires an awful lot of buttons to play.

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