Too bad there is nearly no lore, and their implementation ruins other, more well-designed aspects of the game.
I wouldn't have minded if they were optional, but a large amount of the endgame content absolutely depend on them. They also break the flow of the game all the time, because:
The first half of the game, the game teaches you that it's fine to take risks, it's fine to do a lot of trial and error, and failing will respawn you pretty close to where you were before with no downsides. Then suddenly, mechs come into the picture, and the slightest miscalculation means that you not only have to pay money to replace the lost mech, but that you have to stop everything you were doing, go back to your hangar, fiddle with menus, then travel back to whereever it was you were before you can continue doing what you were actually interested in doing.
They're also an enormous money sink to upgrade, and you practically end up with characters that have close to 30 item slots that you need to keep track of, upgrade, and compare to hundreds of items. Now, I love having customisation options, but nearly 30 item slots for at least 4 characters leads to an enormous money sink, that again breaks the flow of the game if you want to keep your gear up to date. This is further expanded by lots of gear having up to 3 customisation slots each. It just starts getting boring after a while, as the UI for changing and comparing items leaves a lot to be desired.
Fuel consumption is another thing that breaks the flow of the game. You have to regularly stop whatever you are doing to fast travel to your barracks and spend a certain currency to refuel in order to be able to keep using them, then fast travel to the closest FT point to where you were before. It adds no actual difficulty to the gameplay itself, just another annoyance that you get very tired of after a while.
XC and the first half of XCX has a strong focus on letting you figure things out on your own, with automatic checkpoints and no death penalties if you choose a bad approach, and allows you to do everything at your own pace and retry as many times as you want, while still offering a lot of actual challenge in combat. The way mechs are implemented is sort of like taking one step forwards and 4 steps back.
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