Steam store battletech urban warfare5/16/2023 Thankfully, the game slowly ramps up the difficulty (it’s tied to your current pilot level) and even provides intel on each mission, so you will never walk into a situation you can’t handle unless you really want to risk it. It will be a while before you start fielding heavy mechs, much less assault class ones. ![]() I had one medium mech for a very long time, a Centurion, and he was kind of the king of my side of the battlefield. With mechs, you will start with mostly light and scout mechs in the main campaign. As such, you probably need to fire pilots as your reputation rises to the point where better employees with higher skill caps become available. So you might get a pilot with a skill of two in missiles and let them grow that skill, but if they are capped at four, then they will never learn more than that. ![]() The one thing I don’t like about pilots is that their maximum skill level is capped for each kind of skill. That way you can build a team of specialists ready to jump into whatever mechs are perfect for the mission at hand. They wont learn anything about cannons or missiles that way, but will soar in that critical skill. Pilots advance in skill by actually using weapon types, so if you want a pilot to get better with laser weapons, drop them in a mech that is bristling with them. At first, you will have lower tiers from both groups. On the management side, you will be hiring pilots and obtaining mechs for your company. There are two main parts of the game, managing your mercenary company and fighting. There is also some amazing LosTech in the game, but it’s rare, as it should be. Then again, a high quality piece of gear from that group can be better than a low quality one from the standard loadout, so don’t discount anything without first checking it out. Those generally do similar damage to the more standard gear, but have longer reload times, generate more heat or have other flaws. So you will run into chemical lasers and conventional rifle type guns. In addition to the standard gear, there are actually some low-tech weapons that people are fielding because of the backslide in technology following the destruction of the Star League. So you will mostly be encountering standard mechs fielded by the great houses or the mercenaries that work for them. The game takes place in the year 3015 and goes to 3049, which is just before the Clan Invasion. BATTLETECH had a much better overall plot, and that is kind of saying something. MechWarrior 5 is no different in that respect, and the overall plot is kind of forgettable. Thereafter you must design your company, hire pilots, obtain and refit mechs, track down contracts and of course fight other mechs in intense combat and campaigns. The plot of MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries follows what is typical for most games set in the BattleTech world in that you somehow become the leader of a mercenary company, normally though some terrible event where your mentor/father/buddy is killed. MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries easily earns 4 GiN Gems out of the gate on Steam, and I suppose we can thank all those who muddled through the early days of the game on other platforms. Yes, I eventually put 800 hours or more into BATTLETECH, but at launch, it was barely a 3 GiN Gem title (out of 5). It took BATTLETECH a long time to find its footing. When compared with the Steam launch of my current favorite mech title, Harebrained Scheme’s BATTLETECH, MechWarrior 5 actually scores higher. I would even classify some of the mods as nearly essential to improving gameplay. They do just about everything from rebalancing the combat to adding color-coding to your mech’s heat gauges. ![]() And because Steam so easily supports player-made mods, it’s easy to add in even more player fixes which are already sitting there ready to go in the Steam workshop. There is even a highly recommended DLC called Heroes of the Inner Sphere which adds a much needed campaign mode to the game. Having been patched and fixed up for over a year, MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is in much better shape as a launch title for players on Steam. And while I detest those PC-exclusive game launches that only go to the Epic Games Store, in this case it might have done the game some good. Now I realize that the game has been out for quite a while now, but it was never available on platforms that I personally had access to, having been an Epic Games Store exclusive for a year and later moving to Xbox One before finally landing on Steam, GoG and other PC platforms. MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is an incredibly fun game to play if you like the action elements of mech combat in the BattleTech world.
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