Mechs & Mercs: Black Talons

An interesting game with some flaws.
The story is about a planet resisting against an invading army. There are others planets with other factions, where secondary missions can be accepted. These are a bit repetitive, and are mostly attack or defend. The campaign missions are more elaborate, with some cool memorable moments. The units are persistent with skill trees, so there's an extra incentive to keep them alive.
My main issue is with pathfinding and strange behaviours. Sometimes one or two soldiers leave cover while the rest of the squad is protected. Some other times they don't move to cover like ordered. And some other times they choose a strange path while moving from point A to B. While this doesn't break the game, it forces you to keep a close eye on your troops, or else you might have casualties for a stupid reason.

It throws you into the midst of battle facing wave after wave of enemy troops. That's how it starts.
Only then you start to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each squad and weapon. It's hard, but also fun.
You are in control of a mercenary unit that's helping one faction defend their planet against an invading army. There are other factions that can become allies or enemies, but every last one of them seems like someone you wouldn't want as a friend.
It's a slow-paced game with large maps. Great for armchair generals, awful for MOBA players.

It's a nice tactical game. Has infantry and mechs with unit progression, different factions with unique soldiers and abilities.
Has an interesting universe with decent lore, although this is mostly delivered by text.
The minus for me is the length / speed of the battles. The heavier soldiers are really slow, and some maps are really large, so things can take a while to happen in some missions.
But it's ok, definitely worth a try.

Broken mechanics, lots of bugs, and the devs abandoned it soon after launch. They got their money and ran, so I wouldn't recommend spending any cash on it.

Just a whole pile of shockingly poor design choices undermining what could have been a solid concept.

Basically it's Dawn of War - but worse on virtually every single point imaginable.

Super disappointing given the efforts that must have been expended.

The game engine is bad. There is a reason this goes on sale for 99 cents. Path finding is horrible, controls are horrible, the core concepts of the game (perma death, resource points, drop zones) are all more of a hinderance and annoyance than feature.

But really the path finding is so bad. So so bad. Slow, and bad. I didn't think it was possible for a game to have such bad path finding, but here we are. It's like no one actually played this game while developing it.

Pros:
- a meaningfully-presented story I could care about
- combat mechanics with some balance and depth. For instance, a quick unit that got into cover in time will nuke slower units caught exposed in the open.
- experience progression makes caring about your troops rewarding

Cons:
- annoying bugs, like:
- units spontaneously leaving cover
- occasionally broken pathfinding leading to infuriating results
- visuals are somewhat monotonous in the first three missions
- insufficient variety in mission structure and even maps, at least as far as I got in the game
- slightly odd XP progression system

Overall, it feels like the game could gain a lot from some extra love by the developer.

Sligthly futuristic strategy game with infantry squads and mechs.
Has some cool details, like all the weapon sets and customization in the infantry squads. This makes it important to keep the squads alive, not only because they cost money to recruit, but also because upper tiers unlock powerful abilities like orbital cannons and artillery strikes.
Optional missions are repetitive but useful to earn some easy money. Campaign missions are much more difficult.
Worth the price.

I honestly want to like this game... a humble RTS, but there are so many frustrating items surrounding it; that playing it is a real grind. It is disappointing the amount of Bugs that this title has. The two which pretty much break the game are: 1. At times your units will stand there and get slaughtered without returning fire and 2. The UI in the lower right hand of the screen will disappear -- meaning you can't interact with mission objectives, reinforce, order new troops etc. Balance and difficulty are also factors which haven't been well considered in this title. Furthermore, in light of all these problems, that fact that you can't save mid-mission is a real kick in the teeth, esp. when a bug is encountered which makes completing a mission impossible.

First of all, i'm a big mech genre fan. I literally grown up with Wargame & Mech Commander series finished them maybe dozen of times. So i was a bit more positive when i buy this game (i even buy on sale!)

Lets see...
+First of all mech-rts games are really few, i'm not talking about spam this mech or this mech-ish games, i'm talking about games with lots of customization & upgrade options. Mechs&Mercs has it and thats a big plus. (how i miss mechcommander...)
+Also you can customize every single unit via skills and weapon selection tab. So your units shows difference with each other and you can get some sweet combos.
(probably that's only good things this game had for now)

Let's review negative sides,
-I'm going to give graphics a mediocre, it's not bad but not good either. Animations however are terrible. Mech's walks animations are still haunting me in my dreams.
-Game is kinda slow paced, especially if you got heavy squads and a big map just ready your supplies in real life, cause that mission gonna take looooong time in your life.
-Unit's are somewhat unbalanced. I'm not expecting a recon will beat a heavy squad but they're melting way too fast. Also Mech's shield recharge rate is kinda useless.
-There's no quick tab options in group selection, you need to manually click a squad then give your order which bored me a bit (for example retreat or reinforce)
-Pathfinding is terrible! You may find some dumb'ss spread your inf. group and stay in few meters ahead of them or few people teabaging your mechs instead of firing in combat.
-Fonts are terrible, if you want nostalgia's around 1990's then it's a good thing, otherwise it's really bad.

For final words. It has potential but not there yet.

This thumbs down makes me very sad. The game SHOULD be cool. It has all of the pieces there. A compelling setting, decent artwork, cool cutscenes. Mechs. I mean, what could go wrong?

Well, simply, a total lack of fun. The game is only about the heavy units, all the others are a waste of time. Part of this is terrible game balance, part of it stems from the mechanic of permanent loss of a unit and all the experience it earns when the last squad member is killed. This is made worse by the fact that the enemy has infinite units, and if the ai doesn't register a response (like while crossing a bridge) you will also lose those units.

What does this mean? It means that rather than an interesting tactical game, you are in for a long slog with slow moving heavy units. Push a position, clear it out, head back and heal. Repeat. Repeat A LOT. Relatively simple missions take 3 to 4 times longer than you would expect.

And you barely get mechs, this is a game about rocket infantry.

At some point you have to stop and ask.... is this even fun? For me, the answer was no.

While I'm a fan of both RTS and Mech centric games this title flat out fails to deliver on either front.

1) The primary complaint you will see anywhere, and that I will confirm myself, is that this game is painfully slow. Even the most mundane of missions will take you much longer than it needs to as your units move at a snails pace through the board. Firefights between anything but the lightest of units are boring to watch as they just sit in one space and chip at each other's health until one drops.

2) The game is a straight tactics game. While not inherently bad, the execution is poor enough that most tactics get thrown out the window in favor of brute force. On top of that unit management is clunky and awkward with only half of your commands really going through and a cover system that pathfinding will never allow you to use 100% correctly.

3) My final and probably biggest but also most personal complaint in regards to this game: "Mechs & Mercs" is more 10% Mechs, 90% Mercs. You'll find that most missions refuse you access to mechs in this mech centric title, leaving you to resort to the aformentioned clunky infantry in cover to cover combat. Not only that but once you actually do get a chance to field the mechs, they control just as awkwardly sans the cover system, and when you get back to the dropship you will consistently need to replace the pilot in an individual mech because the game has this odd habit of removing them post interaction.

It's honestly very disappointing that a great concept like this went down the tube due to poor execution. The graphics, while lackluster, aren't bad for a standard rts. The unit designs are pretty basic but get the job done well, and the mechs look decent. There was a lot of potential here but the game is effectively not fun to play.

Great Strategic/Tactical RTS, a few minor issues, (unable to deploy 2nd Mech in combat, pilots are automatically removed from mechs after each mission), allied squads tend not to show if you deploy one in initial landing (not sure if they'll show after losing the same type in mission.

this game needs an update patch, AI to hard to many enemy units constant swawning uneven game play. i like the concept, the in game graphics and units but when units take a beating and they do a lot in this game you need to get them all the way back to a dropship platform to get reinforcements fo the units. why not give your units a medic or if you capture an objective you can call in reinforecemnts from there. the basic infantry units are worthless they die to easy and all the gun enplacements i place just get destroyed so easily. it has the makings of a really good game but needs a better balance of play AI needs to be tuned down. then it will really be enjoyable to play. i stopped playing this game after scenario 3 where you have to capture 3 landing platforms and then hold them for 5 minutes. after i had captured all three i had 5 gun turrets at all 3 places plus at least 8 units at all 3 locations, thought i had killed all the enemy only to see 15 or 20 enemy units spawn out of nowhere to over run my main middle dropship pad. every unit was destroyed how fustrating after 3 tries i gave up game over. this is only one example of uneven game play. i hope the company who makes this game reads these reviews and comes up with updates and patches and not let this game fall into the abyss.

This game is just bad.

Why is it so bad? Where to begin? Lets start... at the beginning.

1. Tutorial: Game says easy mode is for "people who've never played RTS before". Well I'm quite a strategy buff, but nothing I've played is much like this game, so that is an inaccurate description on their part. Most likely if you've never played THIS GAME before, you should probably start on Easy.

2. There's very little strategy. Unless you consider "walking up to enemies and shooting them while trying not to stand on a bridge" a strategy. The game touts things like crossfire and cover, and ... not standing on bridges because there are armor penalties (or bonuses). But there's no real strategy. Its mostly just blasting enemies with as many guys as you can while damaged sections run away (tediously) to healing pads. If you're looking for anything resembling real tactics... you might want to look elsewhere. Before I explain what I mean, let me define a few things...

DEFINITION: Strategy
Strategy usually means managing at a macro level (research, gathering resources to build a larger army, capturing choke points etc) for advantage. There are resource locations in this game, but they're not terribly useful excpet that they generate the money needed to heal units. Once your best units are in the field: there is nothing more to buy. More units just get in the way and distract from you trying not to get your best people killed (squad death is permanent).

DEFINITION: Tactics
Tactics is about singular engagements (hitting the enemy in ways that they can't hit back, flanking, or rock-paper-scissors). What do I mean by "rock-paper-scissors"? In a hypothetical modern warfare game, it would be something like.... attacking the enemy helicopters with AA, while your helicopters attack their tanks, while your tanks attck their AA. When you maximize the number of your units specialized at killing a particular unit type, with engagements against that unit type: that is a good tactic and makes for a good game. In this game, everything early-on defers to the all powerful heavy rocket infantry, and later on to mechs. All weapons have about the same range, so there's no sense of pinning an enemy down while snipers pick them off (etc). Its just NOT THERE in this game. Everything is about having the most guns to bear at a particular time and making sure that the "last guy" in any unit isn't killed because then the unit dies.

3. The unit AI is abysmal. Its really annoying and frustrating, especially in a game where you constantly have to scroll around to do things like checking that enemies haven't spawned behind you, or sending units back to healing pads. You will frequently find that you will send an order, go do something else, and then come back to find out that the order was ignored. Units get stuck on the map, ignore orders to shoot stuff (or don't return fire when they are under attack). Attacked units will not complete their order. Units tasked with entering a bunker, may or may not just stand there and jitter spasmotically, while others allow themselves to get shot up by enemies standing directly next to them, or just wanders off to die in the enemy camp. The only thing that saves you from defeat at the incompetence of your idiot soldiers is that the enemy AI is even dumber. The whole enemy strategy seems to consist of "reinforce as often as possible and send them at the player". While this seems simple, its often made tediously impossible by giving the player 1 spawn pad and the enemy AI 6 or 7 per level, then forcing the player to also manage some other tedius task like "evacuate the civilians" or "don't lose your engineers" at the same time. And speaking of that...

4. Mission parameters don't make sense. Mission 1 the goal requires engineers. You can get new engineers at the drop ship pad. Despite the fact that you can get more, you "lose" the game if you lose all your engineers in the level, despite the fact that you might have more in reserve... ready to be called down at a moment's notice.

5. The sound is REALLY messed up. Music is WAY too loud. I turned it off, only to find that the video cutscene sound (including voice and sound effects) are on the same audio track!

6. What's with the unskippable cut scenes?

7. What's with the non-standard RTS game controls?

8. The story is non-existent. I wanted to know more about the game universe, but clicking around on the strategic map only tells you planet name and whether there's a mission. Ingame fiction seems to have been overlooked.

9. WHAT DO UNITS DO? There is no encyclopedia that I can see. No hover hints. You pretty-much have to guess if a unit is what you want. But I suppose that makes sense, since all the units seem identical anyway. The game says units have special abilities, but I haven't seen it (other than for engineers). They appear to unlock later. So until then: enjoy your all-the-same units.

So is there anything good? Artwork seems pretty good. It has a compelling look, albiet overly-busy and maybe slightly lower quality than the game dictates. I like the abundance of fully-rendered cutscenes. This is one thing that has disappeared from games recently that I would wish to come back. And RTS for that matter: its not a dead genre. But big publishers won't make it because it doesn't port nicely to console. Its nice to see that a game company is at least TRYING to make an interesting RTS.

That's all I have for now. Thanks for reading!

This is a harsh and unforgiving game. Period. It does not hold your hand or give you any inherent advantages. You have to fight and plan like you know what you're doing because if your idea of tactics is a mob rush it's going to get VERY expensive for you very quickly.

That being said it offers a rather impressive tactical combat system involving short/long ranges for weapons, requiring the intelligent use of cover and troop designs where you can be strong or fast but rarely both. The upgrade system has more depth than most realize at first glance as the 'generic +1 upgrades' are actually a surprisingly powerful way to make your troops more durable or specialize them to a combat role, i.e. static defenders focus on cover and long range damage, assault types utilize armor/health and close range, etc.)

The inclusion of different armor tiers is a very nice touch given the size of most of the maps, but the rocket problems (see below) force the lighter and faster troops to the wayside in favor of simple survivability. The faction troops are another very interesting idea, but one I simply haven't had time to fully explore.

The early mechs are light weight, fast, and heavily armed... but also rather fragile so protect your pilots if you want to use those bigger more devastating machines later.

The game only actually has a couple glaring problems that unfortunately overshadow some excellent system designs.

Rockets are fired at a particular point, never miss and fire through cover, which combined with the AOE and extreme damage make them arguably the perfect weapon. This is beyond a doubt the most broken part of the game. Rockets should have a (high) chance of being blocked by cover as they're direct fire weapons as opposed to grenade launchers that would arc over said cover. Also consider that an RPG and AT rocket are two VERY different weapon systems. The current design of the rocket systems literally make every other weapon inferior in almost every situation.

The lack of any medical support for troops means wounded men are a liability until they die. There are multiple ways to fix this, either through medics that heal over time out of combat (maintaining the sense of pressure intrinsic in the game) or via insta-heal when reinforcing from a Landing Pad. The latter is easier to do as it applies the current system for mech repair to infantry.

Overall it's an impressively designed game with some rather dated graphics and a couple glaring issues, though for my money it's a great purchase. If the problems it has were fixed I think it'd be better than CoH, but that's just my opinion.

After playing this for a very short time I have a severe case of buyers remorse. Combat is very poorly balanced and the first mission was so bland I doubt I will ever play this game again. Heavy units trump everything, no need for any other unit except engineers to do quest items like unlocking bridges. I am now making a firm commitment to never buy another release day game because of the trash that studios are pumping out nowadays. I can't even say for sure what genre this game fits into. Its seems like a mix of quite a few of which none are done well. Graphics are weird, gameplay is weird, and the game just isn't any fun to play.

After playing for a few hours i can say that i do not recommend this game (for now).

-Side missions are almost tower defense style, enemy dropships take reinforcements every minute, forcing you to turtle chockepoints and deal with constant suicide rushes.
-There is no lifebar on bunkers or turrets, neither vivible external damage, so you never know when they are going to blow up and kill you squad inside.
-Squads only become usefull after they level up and anything below armor 350 is just useless, dying to easy.
-The game gets boring fast, has no autosave, it feels like incomplete.

Me recomendation is to wait at least a month, so they can update and more reviews show up.

so far the game is a no go and since i already bought it i am going to play something else for now.

This had the potential to be a great game, the rough mechanics for some great ideas are there. However, the basic fundamental parts of the games control scheme and balance were rushed and are very poorly done. A lot of it is just little stuff that every other major RTS gets right, such as being able to select units and click the mini-map to get them to walk to that location, etc.

The biggest issue I ran into though was balance, on just about every mission the enemy has infinite spawns of squads that will come after you, and they just about always know where your guys are, so flanking isn't much of an option. Since you are perpetually outnumbered, your squads lose grunts, and then you have to march them back to the landing zone to replenish them. This pretty much means you have to conserve your guys and thrust from landing zone to landing zone, there's no real way to take it slow, because attrition will just wear you down too much.

They hyped up the mechs and really seemed to want them to be a great mechanic for a very powerful ally, but those are broken too. Engineers can't repair them in the field, so they also have to tromp back to the landing zone for repairs which are prohibitively expensive, all in exchange for pretty lackluster supporting fire and very little tanking ability at best.

Finally, the infantry(which is your main core of units in this game) are horribly balanced. Essentially, light squads are useless, medium squads pretty much go 1 for 1 against the enemy(which are horrible ratios when you are always outnumbered by an enemy with unlimited supplies) and heavy troops are the only troops that are worth having. Your heavy troops will mow through a squad or 3, and by then they have lost enough people to be rendered combat ineffective, and have to tromp back to the landing zone themselves, which takes forever because of their heavy armor.

This just killed the flow of the game for me. There's a lot of great ideas here from other RTS's that I love, such as Dawn of War 1 and Starcraft 2, but the execution is absolutely clunky and horrible. This game hasn't been out long, maybe the developers will add some actual balance so this game isn't so goddamn nintendo hard. The simplistic AI and poor balancing pretty much just makes this game a meatgrinder.

This is the kind of game that takes "every concept from every game" and throws them all together. But, there is no concern for things like "balance" or "gameplay".

The game has an XP system. Except you'll max our the trees-that-matter on your units in a few short missions, after which you just spend your XP on generic +1 hp upgrades. Of course, the first mission has infinitely respawning enemies and no time limit, and yes enemies give you XP per kill. So it's trivially easy to just sit on a mostly-won mission and farm up XP if you really care to.

The game has unit types. Except scouts are worthless since heavy armor shines so much in comparison to light armor. For 200-points-per-unit, you can have a heavy armor soldier who can stand in an open field and kill any enemy troop that is not also heavy armor. For 100-points-per-unit, you can hire a scout, that can die horribly when confronted by any enemy whatsoever. Oh, and if your whole squad is wiped out, all of their XP is lost and they're dead forever. Also, light troops can die to a single attack from many enemies in the game. What are the benefits to light troops you ask? None, they have no benefit other than being cheaper to resupply the squad in the field.

Those are just a few examples, I could keep going, but I don't think I need to.

This game is a gigantic pile of steaming... wasted potential. It could have been a good game, if they had anyone on their team that understands "why" these other games have the mechanics they do, instead of just including them willy-nilly with no understanding of why they're adding them.

I have NOT played this game very much, but here is a quick review of my first session.

First impression is it's just so so so clunky and slow.

So far it reminds me of playing through those first few missions of any RTS like starcraft or red alert stuff. You're trying to grab helipad dropship checkpoint things to heal/resupply and little oil pumper things to earn command points to call down more of your stuff. You get your little group of infantry and go blow up things, have some floating female coordinator telling you random updates. But with only two unit types, infantry squads of 4-6 people and individual mechs. Each can have different loadouts or types.

But much crappier.

The squads are awkward to control. There is a decent cover system, stand near barrels or trees or whatever to get upgrade, stand on bridges or open areas to get defense nerfs. The units rarely work they way you want them to. Click to secure an area, they may go stand in the general area. If there are enemies involved good luck. They basically just do whatever they are going to do. Had to turn on a 'ignore enemy fire' and move option just to keep my guys from standing on bridges getting killed or engaging an enemy while they were 2 pixels away from cover. Clicking on the cover again often makes them move away from it or in other directions, not sure how the movement AI works.

The minimap is horrendous. A small red trapezoid that is roughly related to the direction you are looking. (That is, click to position the trapezoid an entire step away from what you want to view). Minimap icons are not easy to follow. You can't zoom out nearly far enough to make sense of much of the battle. Everything is just SO SLOW. It feels like lag, but it's not, it's just the awkward movement of everything.

Randomly throughout any mission 'enemy airstrikes' show up. So you have to quickly click around the crappy minimap and find each of your sqauds and move them a few feet each so they are not standing in the giant target. Easier said then done. Often in a group when I would try to move them, they would all wander weird directions because I clicked them into cover or whatever. I was playing a mission to secure three checkpoints, one checkpoint my dudes were just sitting around drinking iced tea in case anyone showed up, the airstrike was coming I asked them to move north. They moved a weird way instead because of some cover and were not just moving north so I clicked for them to move north again. Half of them walked right back the other directions in the middle of the target and were killed. Red Alert in the 90s or whatever had a 'scramble' hotkey. If this game does too it hasn't bothered to mention it during the tutorial/walkthrough. Units in modern and even older RTS games were super responsive and people talk about micro and CPM and stuff. Controlling units in this game is 90% of the difficulty so far. This is terribly implemented movement.

The mechs are nice. Slow and clunky, but IN A PROPER WAY. Because they are giant multi-ton machines and they act like it. They pivot fast, shoot and kill what you want them to shoot and kill, and act very nice. That being said, they have shields/armor and just take linear damage through them until they catch on fire or whatever and eventually I assume blow up. Haven't lost one yet. Why is that? Because you can just sit them on a 'drop point' or helipad thing you get reinforcements on and spam 'heal' on them and they are magically healed. Same goes for infantry squads. Lose 5/6 of your guys in the squad? Go stand on the helipad and spam the heal button. They are resurrected instantly.

Also, countdowns and numbers are meaningless. "Dropship will be available in 100...99...98..." 98 somethings. 5-10 seconds later it has gone down a few numbers. Very slow. Then you have on the same exact screen a timer counting down for when the next civilian evacuation will take place. And it is clicking away a few times per second, until it hits 8 and all the sudden the announcement is made they are coming. The dropship countdown is super slow. I mentioned spamming repairs and resurrecting squad members on helipads, it takes so long to get a dropship in the early part of the game you have nothing better to spend your money on. Another good way to spend the cash is spam turrets or bunkers that your engineers can build. Not necessarily because you need them, but because they earn XP for building them and you have plenty of spare command points anyway.

The infantry squads have a number above them, which is how many guys in the squad are still alive (then if you click each individual dude has his own health meter, for whatever that is worth. Civ and others reconciled this just by having a 'health bar' for the whole squad and as it dropped guys died from the group. I suppose this system is technically better, because having 6 wounded dudes firing is still providing higher firepower than having 2 dead guys and 4 perfect guys like the Civ system might fail to model. But one of the big UI problems with this is each time one of your guys dies he may go violently flying off in an explosion or whatever, or multiples of your guys die, etc. But the little number disappears for a bit and then reappears with the new number. So if you have two or three squads fighting, the health indicators are constantly flickering on and off as you see guys flying away in explosions and stuff. So its hard to really tell at any given point how quickly you are loosing men or where you are at with each squad in the middle of a fight.

Upgrading squads and the tree paths are nice, a feature that improves ANY game. Love that kind of stuff, but it's fairly basic in this. It is hard at this point, so early in the game for me, to decide any noticeable difference in the paths of the trees. Units 'upgrade' between battles with the trees and you keep the squads together and choose their loadouts almost like a crappier XCOM hanger system but each guy represents six little dudes on the ground.

Anyway I don't know. Buy it on a Steam sale someday or try it out for yourself. It's not a great game by any means, but it's not terrible. Clicking around with a souped up mech mowing down enemy infantry squads is very enjoyable. I'm not disappointed I bought it, even at that price because I want to support the genre and it makes a very solid attempt at bringing a good RTS with mechs style game to the table. The graphics are excellent for what it is, menus and between mission planning and upgrading and stuff is very well implemented. But it has a LOT of cons that make it tough to recommend. I am giving it a thumbs up because I would hate to downvote a game in the genre before giving it a fair shot. I've yet to work with multi-mech squads or later missions or upgrade things enough to say it is definitively bad. But so far it is not looking good.

tl;dr
Crappy XCOM-meets-first-few-tutorial-levels-of-RTS-games" with frustratingly awful to control units. But mechs are not bad and always a pro in any game.