Probably the last major PC release of the year – and the last Epic exclusive – is the return of big, hulking mechs.
Mechwarrior 5 finally dropped late last week, offering the first-person dose of juggling lasers, tank controls and positioning that’s been missing for a while. Mechwarrior Online has been kicking around for years, of course, but it’s not the same as a curated, proper single-player experience, which Mechwarrior 5 promises. And if you like the duality of a first-person tank game with a management sim, much like BattleTech, then the elevator pitch sounds pretty good.
I’ve played a few hours of MechWarrior 5 so far, which is only just enough to open up the starmap and accompanying systems. The game’s fairly slow getting up until that point; a nasty bug forced me to restart the second mission three times. The latest Nvidia Game Ready driver makes a massive difference as well. I was finding the game to be really janky initially, even on an RTX 2080 Ti at 1080p or 1440p. Gameplay is a lot smoother now, so if you haven’t updated the driver, definitely do that.
There isn’t a whole lot I can say about the story, although early indications don’t leave me with a lot of hope for the writing. It’s been a bit hamfisted in the early stages and heavily telegraphed. The combat has a good tactical element, though, although I’m waiting to see some mixups in gameplay and missions that end up a little more strategically intriguing than just battling waves of tanks/VTOLs with the occasional mech. It’s early days, though, and I’ll have more on the game this week after I’ve opened things up a little more.
If you’ve been knocking out MechWarrior 5, how have you found it so far?
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