Very cool game. All the sauce in all the right places. Great, heavy sounding audio. Slick menus.
Oh god, tank controls.
Oh god, the acronyms.
Oh god, the missiles in my face.
Made it through the tutorial and a couple missions that were basically 4v4 battles.
Defend and Supply Raid missions kicked my ass and even after a retrying it a few times I'm not r e a l l y sure what I might be doing wrong... Maybe the learning curve is just steep and I haven't put enough time into it.
The 2x4 aiming modes is kinda wild and I still can't really tell where my gun is or should be pointing half the time. Lead and Auto make sense but why would I want to use Lag?
I'll say there's a lot of strategizing I didn't do outside of the missions, such as building more effective mechs or bringing more than the 4 starting mechs into battle. So take the following with a grain of salt:
The one raid mission I retried the most was a 1-star night mission to destroy some supply containers and evac before reinforcements showed up, and for the life of me I could barely get close enough to see the containers before blowing up. Thermal vision helped a tiny bit but the trees were dense and the barrage of 5000 missiles made close/mid range strategies impossible. Trying to pick off enemies at long range with the Spectre's 1 measily LRM was also ineffective, as dumping it's entire ammo stores failed to kill even a single tank at "effective range" (maybe I was being jammed(?))
The next mission I tried was a 1.5-star defense mission, where I experimented with letting the AI aim and only issuing commands. I can confirm the AI is a much better shot than me, and is better and standing being the allied tank line as to not get focused down and immediately perish, but unfortunately the superior enemy forces repeatedly won out, with almost no noticable casualties on their side.
My poor prep is likely to blame, but it feels like I have nothing to really contribute on the battlefield, given the AI is better shot than me and can more quickly pick effective targets out of the sea of red dots on the UI. In the command view I can tell the speedy scout to not rush in and die, or my units to take high ground, but I can't say either proved very effective...
SO IM A BIT FRUSTRATED
I'll say the mech building aspect is neat with the grid modules, hardpoints, etc. Though the time/money constraints as well as the starting mechs all being equiped up to their weight limit made it a bit hard to find worthwhile improvements. At most, I took the (seemingly useless) jumpjets off the Spectre and traded it's SRM for 2 more lasers.
Hard for me to make recommendations given my struggle to get started. Everything looks very cool, the management is all cool, but when I get into a mission and try to play the game it feels like I'm shooting into piles of trees or a sea of red boxes and not hitting anything, right up until a storm of missiles falls on my head.
That said, good luck! It's got a lot of potential!