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.

Excellent once modded.

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