MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries [1.0.193] (2019) RePack [Full]
Siri Vonbank
Whereas in previous Mechwarrior games you played a fairly anonymous mechwarrior with no real objective other than to make money or to serve your squadron, in Mechwarrior 4 your character has a history and a mission. The commonwealth of planets known as the Inner Sphere, who banded together over the course of previous games to fight the invading ex-colonists known as The Clans, have had a bit of a falling out and are now laying into each other with great gusto. And it just so happens that your father and your homeworld have fallen at the hands of an opposing faction, resulting in his and your mother's death, leaving only you and your missing sister as survivors. So you join up with your off-world allies in an attempt to take down the mechwarrior faction who killed your family. As the game begins, you've jumped into a mech and been dropped, along with a fellow mech-warrior, into the first of five combat arenas where you get up close and personal with your metal-clad foes - let the pagga begin.
However, Mechwarror 4 is not a an all-out arcade blaster - your enemies have access to the same technology you have and are quite capable of doing a great deal of damage to your mech if you get too cocky. Mech to mech combat is not a matter of ploughing into a lance of enemy mechs, chucking a couple of missiles at each of them and watching them blow up - the only way you're likely to get a quick victory over an opposing mechwarrior is if they're piloting a particularly small mech (as mechs come in various sizes) and you're stomping along in a hundred ton armed-to-the-teeth mech such as an Atlas. More likely you'll find yourself lobbing a few long range missiles at an enemy mech or mechs, then, as you close in on your foe, circle around them, launching short range missiles and firing lasers and other weapons.
It's up to you to make sure your mech has the appropriate weaponry to take on your foes - I favour a mech-load of lasers along with an autocannon or two for close encounters. At least, I did in Mechwarrior 3. In Mechwarrior 4, you can still choose which weapons to place on your robot in the 'Mechlab', accessible before each mission, but you can't arrange them freely as in the previous game. Instead, and this is the second reason why Mech 4 isn't quite as good as Mech 3, you have several predefined 'hardpoints' on your mech - some of the colour coded points are missile points, some are cannon points, and some are laser points. So you can only put missiles on corresponding points and you don't have total control over how you can configure your mech's weaponry, which is a bit disappointing and simplifies the game just a little - and besides, it isn't the way weapons are allocated in 'Battletech', the board game and RPG upon from which the mechwarrior games are derived.
All of these games are fun to play, although as always, team playing with people over the internet whom you've only just encountered can be somewhat chaotic, so I suspect organised Mech4 clans may have the edge there. But best of all, Mechwarrior 4 is, bar none, the smoothest lag-free game I've played in ages - using an ordinary 56K modem, I joined several games and each one was smooth as silk with no noticeable lag effects. And in single player mode, too, Mechwarrior 4 is in itself a playable and fairly entertaining game, making a pleasant change from the round of arcade shoot-em-ups - certainly anyone jumping into the mechwarrior series with this title won't be disappointed, although those who played and enjoyed the previous game might be a little put out.