Recent reviews by Sharkfighter

TL;DR - Excellent introduction. Mediocre implementation. Horrid ending.

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Starting off with the best that Shadow of Kerensky has to offer, the beginning missions where you first square off against Clan Wolf have to be some of the most dread inducing, badass experiences I've had with this game so far. Going into them with a fully kitted mercenary company grinded through every DLC, I had grown use to bulldozing through level 100 missions with my lance of assault bots, so when it came time to actually fight the clans for the first time - half of my mech was gone in the first three minutes and for once I was forced to think about my approach instead of mindlessly holding down W and spamming PPC's and Gauss shots at my enemy.

I'm 95% positive that the first clanners you fight are actually buffed to account for the pirates and allies you get because the following two missions, while still a kick in the balls, was nowhere near as hard. Being forced to abandon your FRR allies also hurt, especially if you played through the previous DLC's. Immediately after these first couple of missions is when things take a nosedive. Ignoring the fact Solaris was cheaper than this DLC, I did feel a bit miffed that it somehow ended up adding more meaningful content than Shadow.

Without spoiling the DLC, you're essentially forced through a bunch of canyons with the only difference being the weather. Each objective boils down to you going to a location and killing the two million clanner mechs that try and stop you on the way there. I wasn't against the difficulty spike; however, this DLC expects you to use the clanner tech to even the playing field, but their salvage rating is so high that at most I was able to salvage a mangled Shadow Cat and the free Loki they give you. This also cycles in the clanner weapons being hard to obtain, their ammo equally as difficult - often forcing you to either handicap yourself by equipping IS weapons or leaving clan mechs to rot in your repair bay while you wait for parts to trickle in.

Slogging through the DLC, you eventually reach the end - though its more like smacking against a brick wall since it just ends abruptly. No additional mini-missions for you to pick up. No big boss fight. You're literally just dropped back into the game world after a the ending cutscene and told to kick rocks. This wouldn't be bad if the Clan Invasion mechanic was fun to interact with, but in practice its just a bunch of max leveled 400 tonnage missions that emulate TF2's MVM by having you slaughter waves of enemies. I never had issues with elementals - primarily because after the Shadow of Kerensky main missions finished I deleted the game. To the DLC's credit, it does also add the Virtual Academy system, but just by playing through the main DLC missions you'll end up amassing a small army of veteran pilots anyway.

The Clan 'mechs themselves do look awesome though, having this other wordly design to them at times. Whoever also wrote the music for the DLC did an excellent job.

My final remark I can make about this DLC would be that it introduces a variety of bugs, and I've even heard rumors that its straining the game itself. While I never had any crashes, even with mods like YAML - AI pilots feel especially stupid this time around and I have no clue why. I've never had to wrangle them this hard before, so I was shocked when I was forced to turn around multiple times to prevent my multi-million c-bill assault mech from getting aired out because the pilot got stuck on a slight elevation and got surrounded by clan mechs. Pilot dialogue is also broken. At times they'll repeat their death phrases of use them without actually dying.

Also, while the developer can't help this, the DLC broke a ton of mods. This wouldn't be an issue normally, but MW5 relies heavily on mod support to feel like a fully fleshed out game, at least to me. So it was awful being forced to wait a month or two before finally being able to try the DLC.

Despite all of this, I'd still giving it a thumbs-up. It's a good boss faction to test end game players, and the story is obviously hinting to another DLC.

One thing that I cannot stand about RPG's, especially those with different classes and 'optimal' builds is how quickly it is to get overwhelmed in a flood of stats, guides and annoying deaths. Now, the last thing is certainly something that can happen, I've found that even with probably the worst party line-up possible, at no point in the game did I ever feel like a fight was just outright unwinnable.

The story is amazing, albeit kinda hard to follow at certain points and the game itself acts a good entry way into DnD proper for anyone who hasn't played it.

My only real complaint is the game is absolutely AWFUL with its saving. I know its up to the player to ensure their save is up to date, but I can't even count the number of times I've been forced to reloot entire buildings, or go through an entire speech tree because the game decided the best save point was an hour ago back at camp.

Going to join the sea of positive comments here by saying Mohrta is probably one of the best games I've played to date. It actually shocked me when I found out that it was a GZDoom mod.

Now, I can say a lot of other praises as well. The level design is fantastic, and is one of the few FPS games released in a while that's had me stop and just look at the backgrounds, even sometimes just sitting there and letting the ambience play in the background while I do other things. Soundtrack wise, Mohrta scores pretty good as well.

I'm not the most musically attuned person in the world, so my description may not be the best, but the game is able to somehow keep this unified style while also keeping each realm you go to unique. Godhead and Demon Princess both take the cake for the best bangers though.

Morhta's story is also interesting, because at a first glance its actually really easy to just dismiss a lot of stuff, and I actually narrowly avoided ignoring all of the level quest NPC's. Thankfully, I bumped into the level 2 NPC and from there I was able to get myself back on track.

Now, with all my praises said, I think its time to move onto the bad. The most primary complaint I can levy against Mohrta would be the overabundance of weapons, even if you have the option to scrap them for Strange Ore. On paper, its good to have diversity, but in reality I only actually found myself sticking to the Trench Gun, Bone Machine Pistol thing and the Larva Launcher. Everything else either felt like a gimmick, side grade or just didn't pack enough of a punch to deal with the frankly inflated health pools in certain levels.

Also, while it may just be my machine, the performance in certain areas can drop pretty badly. I don't think I had any major issues for most of the game except for the Plaguelands which only really seemed to be isolated to the first area, with the other sections playing smoothly.

Finally, I found that the balancing for the different realms you can enter was completely busted. Level 1 maintained a good balance, but Level 2 absolutely kicked my ass in certain sections and felt like it dragged on for way too long. This ended up whipping me into shape, so much to a point that past Level 2 all the other realms felt comically easy at times.

I was able to defeat the Plaguelands final boss in just a couple of minutes and I was so taken aback by this I had to pull up a guide to make sure there wasn't some hidden encounter I missed that revealed her true form or something.

With all that I just said, I would still recommend Mohrta. You're not going to get some world breaking experience, and just like every other retro-styled FPS on the market there is going to be problems, but if you look past that then underneath the jank you'll find an excellent passion project with a lot of hidden world building.

On a final note, if you don't like alien ladies with their breasts out then you might want to skip past this actually.

Honestly, the only thing that really gets me with this game is that the level design can be a bit hard to follow at times. In my first playthrough I had to use noclip twice just because I couldn't for the life of me figure out what I was supposed to do.

Beyond that, it's a very solid game and with the upcoming Ultimate Edition, I'm hoping these problems with be addressed.

When it comes to Mechwarrior 5, I think many people, especially hardcore fans of the series fail to forget that it's essentially the Call of Duty for Battletech. Before I installed this game, I had absolutely no interest in the series, you couldn't pay me anything to get involved and I frankly found it lackluster.

After installing this game and giving it a try, I was enraptured by how it felt to pilot the mechs and the general "feel" of the different factions and the setting. Nowadays I've gotten deep into the tabletop via MekHQ and I've studied the lore.

Now - coming from a game standpoint, MW5 can get pretty boring with the base game. There isn't many unique contracts to do, and the main story is good enough, albeit bland. With the DLC's, you get a pretty good selection of story lines, although the final Solaris one does feel a bit rushed and lacking for an end game MechWarrior. Despite that, the voice acting and soundtrack is enough to carry all of them so they don't end up feeling like generic missions with unique objectives.

As per usual, mods are a must. The YAML series of mods, including the Yet Another Clan Mech are solid additions to any playthrough and also add the clans which serve as a final boss faction in a way.

So with mods and the DLC's, MW5 is a solid 8/10 imo.

I REALLY want to enjoy this game, but there are numerous drawbacks that make it impossible to even get past the third level. One of the biggest in my opinion is the absolute horrid voice acting and character models in the game, somehow despite not being character focused in the slightest, Mercenaries was able to convey more emotion from the various mook pilots you fight then the entire cast combined.

Add that ontop of the ugly looking character models, then you already gut a good chunk of what is supposed to be a single player experience. Additionally, somehow despite using assets from the old game, the performance is absolutely terrible to the point that combat with two or more mechs just becomes an drag of random laser and machine gun fire.

On the topic on mechs, it may just be me, but the somehow feel WORSE. I'm not expecting Armored Core level of movement ability, but something about how they pilot and how stiff and janky the enemy mechs look just takes me out of the experience.

Again, I 've tried numerous times to enjoy this game, but I cannot muster up the courage to play it more than a couple minutes before deleting it and replaying MW4 and MW5 If you're absolutely desperate for more Mechwarrior content, then I would suggest giving this a play, but just don't expect the same quality from other entries.

I hate to say it, I really do.

But this game is not fun.

Enemies are way too tanky at times, with it feeling like shots aren't even connecting with them despite landing point-blank hits. The performance is dreadful at times, which is funny because the graphics themselves just aren't that great, which has me stumped on how the game can perform so bad.

A-life is pretty much nonexistent, with groups of enemies more or less just appearing in thin air like Cyberpunk 2077 pre-phantom liberty and so far the characters don't seem all too interesting.

On another side note, I'm really sad that most of the English VA's are either Brits, Aussies or just generic American sounding dudes. I know its a meme to have the English voices in Stalker, but something about the OG games low-effort but funny sounding voices really made the Zone feel more alive.

Don't be like me and impulse buy. Wait for some updates or fan patches then consider.

Keeping in mind this is an early access game, I will ignore the performance and general janky animation and movements. With that being said, if you're buying this and attempting to run it on a poor software then don't expect good results.

With that out of the way, I can say that this game with its current gameplay loop and mechanics certainly does need work. For one, the game really lacks variety. A lot of the loot spawns in the same places, with enemy encounters running pretty much the same every raid I've done, with the few unscripted encounter between NPC's just being a straight slugging match with no tactics on either side. Don't get me wrong, what set pieces are set up look great, and the fighting when done properly can really drag you in, but when you take a minute to really observe the NPC's beyond just a glance, you start to notice the holes in how they act.

Another thing of note is the water system, which honestly makes no sense to me at all, and honestly seems to exist to force players to interact with the game or risk losing everything you worked for, oh and that really stings when you realize how hard it is to survive. I'm not an extraction shooter veteran by any means, but it feels like the the enemy encounters are just overwhelming brutal, with entire squads just fading into reality at the last second and killing me. The biggest offender of this are those annoying cyborgs, which just roam the map randomly and don't really engage anybody.

I absolutely hate fighting them, as just killing a few forces Hunter Killers to spawn, which doesn't really make sense for any enemy that in lore was designed to be thrown at the enemy with little regard. You may be tempted to sneak around them, but its like they always go in the path you are, and once they lock in you can't outrun them easily, resorting in you being forced to kill them, causing Scramblers or Hunter Killers to spawn.

There are other minor complaints, like awful enemy animations, a pretty lack luster tutorial and somewhat clunky UI that took me a minute to grasp.

With that being said, i've been looking forward to this game for ages. I love the art direction, and when this game does things right it excels. I'm confident that the game will be great with time and encouragement from the fans.

Short DLC, running you roughly 4-5 hours depending on your skill level. It's much of the same from the first, with the NPC dynamic being pretty good if you actually take time to talk with your crew and read the Farro's little notes. The T-600 and T-650 were also neat additions, and the certain "lost survivor" scene with one actually gave me a slight jump.

A very good entry into the Terminator series, and honestly a reminder that all you need to make a good game is just a somewhat decent story, good gameplay and some love/effort. Which this game has in abundance. If you're looking for a good game to put some time into, this would be your bet.

My only real complaint would be that some levels are reused, but I imagine this was due to budget restraints, and even then the combat systems make up for it.