If you have nothing else good to say about the Mechwarrior series, at least you can say it's consistent. Microsoft doesn't change the forumla with Mechwarrior 4 Vengeance, only adjusts the mixture. The end product serves up the bad along with the good and won't surprise anyone familiar with the series, except that instead of poor multiplayer and great singleplayer we get poor singleplayer and great multiplayer. You can stomp cars, buildings, and smaller vehicles. Bad men drive big robots.
Bad robots shoot at good robots.
Die bad robots, die. True, the real Mechwarrior story is quite detailed and complex but it's not used in Mechwarrior 4 aside from object names. That's about all you need to know to start playing and not coincidentally equal to the depth of the story in the game. The developers decided to use real actors to provide faces along with voices during mission briefings. While that isn't a bad decision in itself you need good actors to keep from ruining the story and immersion.