How MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries’ creators plan to re-arm the series

For all the propulsive destruction and pinpoint gunplay of acclaimed shooters like Call of Duty or Counter-Strike, they don’t let you experience the physicality or limitations of a soldier’s body. You might as well be a floating gun, for the most part. When you step into the pilot’s seat in Piranha Games’ upcoming MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, however, you feel every tonne of the giant robot you control: smashing your way through buildings with comic ease, lurching around drunkenly as you take a full five seconds to change your heading while rockets detonate against your flank. If, like me, you haven’t played a MechWarrior game in over a decade, trying to wrap your head and fingers around the game's chunky, tank-like move-and-shoot control scheme can prove a tad galling at first. The game encourages you to throttle your mech forward in one direction while aiming and blasting ordnance in another, which takes a little getting used to, but becomes as natural as circle-strafing in time. Like its predecessors, MechWarrior 5 is shaping up to be a slower, more deliberate breed of action game, especially in the pace of its combat. There’s plenty of smashing and shooting, sure, but they’re buffeted by layers of finesse and strategy that grant the series a frankly intimidating amount of depth. Rather than the starkly-linear early entries, MechWarrior 5 follows in the footsteps of the beloved 2002 standalone expansion pack for MechWarrior 4: Vengeance, titled MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, which offered the player three different endings. According to Russ Bullock, president and founder of Piranha, the studio wants to modernise the choice-heavy format of Mercenaries in order to increase the game's replayability, which he feels has been a historic weakness of the series.

from PCGamesN https://ift.tt/2PeIpC5