MEAT VS METAL

MECHWARRIOR 5: MERCENARIES is the solid return of a beloved sim series.

- Jon Bolding

This throwback mech sim honors the 30-year MechWarrior legacy very closely: in mechanics, in controls, and even in the soundtrack. Bombastic guitar riffs thunder over every combat, lasers sizzle, PPCs crackle, and gauss rifles make that weird ‘pew’ noise, you know the one. Mechs stomp and break and explode spectacularly, leveling buildings around them. In short: MechWarrior is extremely back.

Not everything about MW5 is rooted in the past. The overall aesthetic fits into the contemporary look of the BattleTech universe. The UI is clean, inspired by the work that went into the Harebrained Schemes’ interface for 2018’s BattleTech. Piranha’s modern mech designs are memorable updates to the dated ’80s designs. They stomp menacingly at each other across a pretty diverse set of battlefields that sit starkly opposed to the near-featureless plains of the MechWarrior past. It also brings in your friends in a co-op mode, both for a campaign and one-off skirmishes, that is both stable and tactically rich. It runs pretty well aside from one glitchy randomly-generated mission and some chug on mission starts.