TL;DR: What does this game have in common with the series? Setting. Nothing else. It's bite-sized absolute crap, to the point of underflowing and becoming good.

Aesthetics are a washed out, characters are visually bland, and age didn't help with visuals overall. If you set a high resolution, you'll be able to count the pixels on the textures. It's amazing. The music is forgettable (but not incredibly bad), and sound design is spotty at best. Some weapons will have a nice punch, while others will sound like free stock sound being heard on a $2 earbud. Some cutscenes of wanzer battles are still amazing, and that's it. But the story? Oh boy, THE STORY.

The story is absolute bonkers. The writing on the series is mostly serious, with a good amount of flair and color. Yes, there is a group of rebels fighting the government, but that doesn't impede a rebel general of having a story about how he destroyed a wanzer with a punch (with "image proof" to boot). But FME? "The powers tried to build a space elevator together. But they failed and abandoned the project. Then they all built their own space elevators. Then, an organization was able to finish building the abandoned space elevator without a SINGLE PERSON IN THE WORLD noticing that." Yes, you can say that a superpowered AI could've interfered a LOT, but no one EVER was able of notice a SPACE ELEVATOR BUILT? That's a stretch and a half a dozen.

Characterization is also absurd. DHZ soldier called Yun is a white blond boy. Basically the protagonist but blonde. The soldier from your country that has hated your guts from day one (because you tried to risk yourself in the middle of a warzone despite being a civilian, fair), speedruns from "you're crazy, stay out of this" to "please, don't risk yourself, I love you" in a few hours flat. The writing in general is the lowest point this series has even been, even considering Left Alive. If you don't take it seriously, you'll have fun.

Gameplay? Aside from the excessive collectibles every mission (to the point a room may have several, even of the same type), the gameplay is great. Enemies are varied enough, customization options are plenty, movement is fun, so is shooting. If you always wanted to try a non-turn-based because the fights and piloting always looked fun, this scratches the itch. Missions also don't over-extend themselves, and so does the game (even on Hard, costing you some retries on a few parts, it's about 7 hours of gameplay).

Game kept crashing when starting the campaign, but Windows 7 compatibility mode worked for me. One mission was crashing often, but after a while the game allowed me to keep progressing without crashing.

So, if it's so bad, why positive review? Doesn't matter. Reading comprehension and all that.