MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries

Solid mech combat with impressive large-scale visuals. Technical inconsistencies and heavy pop-in.

A genuinely fun, immersive mercenary sim where you run your own MechWarrior outfit, freely roaming a sandbox Inner Sphere map taking contracts, building reputation, and customizing your lance of mechs within tonnage limits. Combat and controls (lifted from MechWarrior Online) feel great, the gameplay loop is absorbing, and at a budget price it offers tons of content. Held back by atrocious campaign voiceovers, a thin story, enemy spawn-ins, pop-in, and occasionally confused AI.

Before You Buy: decent mech combat faithful to franchise but balance and AI need tweaks; fairly decent fun.