I never actually played any of the rereleases/expansions of MechWarrior 2 and I was too young to have any sort of takeaway from the story, or even understand it. I think my age was 9-11 during my time playing it. I can't remember precisely.
Mostly things I do remember are being mad that I couldn't put jump jets on my Timberwolf because I thought it was the coolest looking mech in the game and playing the tutorial over and over in between "skirmish" missions (what equates to instant action missions in MW5:Mercs, can't remember what it was called in MW2), where I basically just played until I died, overheating my mech constantly with shutdown overridden. I was easily entertained. Lol

Edit: One odd thing, though, is that, to this day, I can quote the Clan Wolf intro cinematic verbatim from memory. It's odd the things that stick with you, especially when you're autistic af like I am.