Good fun and the DLC is worth it, though it can be found on sale if your on the fence. All of my hours are steam deck and it runs fine, even when heavily modded.

Highly Recommended

With over 140 hours of playtime (still modest compared to many players), MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries has become one of my favorite gaming experiences. The thrill of building and managing a mercenary company, customizing battlemechs, and jumping into intense combat is unmatched.

The game shines in its mix of strategy and action. As a commander, you carefully manage your resources, contracts, and personnel. In the cockpit, every battle feels dynamic and impactful, with satisfying mech customization to match your playstyle.

While the core game is fantastic, mods can take it to the next level, offering expanded options for those who want to tweak the experience further. It's a game that rewards planning, skill, and persistence, and it’s easy to lose yourself in the grind of becoming a legendary mercenary outfit.

If you're into mechs, strategy, or just blowing things up in style, I can't recommend this game enough!

So far, this is the best Mechwarrior since Mech2. Definitelly a must have.

Cool classic MW

I know this is not everyone's cup of tea, but for me past Mechwarrior games have been instrumental to my life as a gamer, and this one rings all the right notes from my past memories. The visuals are really great, gameplay of the original game (without DLC) is a bit simple and gets boring fast, but it becomes an entirely different game with the DLC. I don't understand why they don't incorporate at least the AI from the DLC into the main game.

I really wanted to like this game - I've never been a huge fan of the franchise, but I've played and enjoyed some of all the previous installments since MechWarrior 2. Unfortunately, this still feels like an early access game, not a finished product that was sold for $50 on release.

AI, as others have mentioned, is completely brain-dead. At one point my mech was destroyed and I found my lancemate had been walking forward into a wall facing away from the enemies the whole time. Hostiles with long-range weapons will still charge your lance, and will happily run right past you so you can shoot them in the back.

Any pretense of this being a "sim" style experience as in the earlier installments is gone. Everything in the game feels set up to force you into a close-range slugging match with your opponents. It doesn't matter if you can visually SEE hostiles at a distance of 1000m, you can't target them until they're about 750m from you. Enemies seem to spawn in from random directions and they basically just keep spawning as long as you're on the map. Many times these are laughably weak air/hovercraft units that can be killed in 1-2 hits - I assume they were worried the players were going to get bored if they had to go more than 15 seconds without shooting something? The random spawning removes another bit of tactics from the game - you can't position your lance strategically if you don't know where the enemy's going to come from.

The biggest issue, however, is the utter lack of mission variety. There are exactly 5 mission types in the game:
- Destroy base
- Defend base
- Destroy # buildings
- Destroy # enemies
- Destroy this specific enemy

That's it - all the mission types in the base game. Each mission lasts about 5-10 minutes and you'll be doing those missions over and over again. Yes, there's some pre-scripted campaign missions, but in 10 hrs of gameplay, I've done exactly ONE of these outside the tutorial that was different enough to actually notice the change. What makes it worse is that all maps feel extremely bland; sure the terrain textures change, but the level geometry is essentially the same every time. There's no level that's mostly flat, there's no level that has extreme canyons, no level that's all forest. Each level has 1-3 bases, and every base looks the same, and has the same generators, radar dishes, etc.

It wouldn't have been a lot of extra effort to either add more variety to mission types or simply reduce the amount of grinding the player has to do between missions and bring the total game time down so you can spend more time in the scripted missions.

The fundamentals of the game are pretty good, and there's probably fun to be had here if you're willing to add DLC and mods, but "out of the box" it's a lousy experience and I can't recommend it to anyone other than fans of Mechwarrior/Battletech who are willing to put in that investment.

Loved the game. However there is a bug once you get to the Lock N Load mission that doesn't spawn the last enemy, and you cant go any further. Fix your ♥♥♥♥ Game developers.

Wait for a fire-sale, consider alternatives like Armored Core, maybe even Front Mission or Brigador. This game is only surviving due to total conversion mods made by people who actually care about the player. The base game is heavily discounted to get players to buy the discounted DLC to onboard the player onto the DLC pipeline. There have been no real changes to the company behind the game.

annoying in every aspect, incredibly difficult to pick up, the mechs feel horrible to pilot, theres very little benefit to doing much, very little customization to anything but the mech's weapons and armour/ammo, which becomes complicit in making it difficult to pick up. probably just not my kind of game but this is horrible to play

Even without Mods or DLC, this game is far better than Clans and I will not pretend Otherwise. Mods only make this game enjoyable for far more time and the DLC increases the experience, especially Kestral Lancers and Raselhague. There is a reason I'm still playing this game after 322 hours and I only sunk 41 into Clans before uninstalling it.