This is what MW5 thinks what a "Personality" is.What dissapoints me about this, straight after having played a battletech campaign and bearing in mind I'm still very much in the refund window having played 110 minutes, is that MW5 doesn't really capture the weight of the thing very well. Aside from the fun of rampaging around bases like a bull in a china shop, which is the most fun I've had causing enviromental destruction since Brigador, there's a lot of circle strafing fights with vehicles and the ocassional mech battle, but...
There are other games that do heayv steel combat: Battlefield V's tank combat isn't as complex as any Mechwarrior game, but it does convey the feeling of "This is a steel death machine" extremely well, especially if you're piloting something ridicilous like a Sturmtiger. Battletech is a turn based tactics game, but it manages to convey the feeling of an AC/10 being a DANGEROUS thing that you should fear very well. Titanfall 2 is a game that is far more about being outside of a mech then it is about being inside of a mech, but the mech battles in that game still convey a sense of lethality even if you are a bit bullet spongy.
All the fights in these games involve tactical thinking, popping in and out of cover, becuase even whilst you are fighting a steel death machine that dominates the battlefield, you aren't the only one. Mechwarrior 3 understood this very well,
And MW5 doesn't really seem to? A lot of the early game combat involves circle strafing with tanks who very slowly chip away at your health. A weapon like the AC/10, which in Battletech is conveyed as this very powerful weapon, seems to have no impact at all when it's brought to bear against a tiny spider, even whilst it can bring down entire buildings in one shot. A weapon which in other games gives you only a 10 round magazine and the mech visibly being brought out of alignment when fired, here only evokes a mild *thud* as you look to your ammo counter to see you have another 90 rounds. And yes, Mechwarrior 4 had a similar problem...
... But Mechwarrior 4 had a way smoother engine. I'm not at all impressed by how the feeling of recieving and taking damage is conveyed in this game. The game's sounds seem muted, and the game's engine itself is pretty janky, there's lots of very visible pop-in all around.
Yes, it's been 19 years since Mechwarrior 4. Yes,
it's been 10 years since that first trailer (and yes, that trailer conveys the feeling of steel metal death better!). But since then we've had games that sold me the "Big robot" fantasy much better then Mechwarrior 5 is diong. Try the older mechwarriors again. Play Brigador. Play Battletech. Play Titanfall 2. Play Mechwarrior Living Legends. This game feels mediocre compared to any of them.
It's also very notable after playing Battletech that Mechwarrior 5 doesn't really understand the fiction of the whole thing very well. Yes, Battletech is cheating a little bit since it's literally the people who made the universe in the first place working on it, but your main antagonist in Mechwarrior 5 is introduced in a battle where he crushes the cockpit of one of his own allies under his feet. The first faction you fight proper just targets defenseless civilians for the fun of it. There's the odd "There are women and children here!" in a setting where women have oficially been part of the armed forces for a thousand years. Your engineer has been written with a slang that is speciifc to a certain part of England, half a galaxy away and a thousand years ago. It's not the intonation that is the problem here: Battletech VA gets this quite right, with various ways of inflecting the english language being there - from the start. MW5 just has US accents and LOOK THIS GUY IS ENGLISH. Despite, you know, a thousand years ago what we now know as "English" was still a bunch of saxons, danes, normans and what have you. Yes I am nitpicky, but it's not really doing quite well with the whole "medieval politics in space" thing that Battletech has. And what it tries to do, Titanfall 2 does better with it's own setting.