MechWarrior 5: Clans

This MechWarrior 5 is nothing at all like MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries. The gameplay here feels janky and the game is loaded with cut scenes. It feels like a more on-rails experience. The mech lab, research, and store are over-complicated and messy to work with. They feature huge icons and button instead of a simple clean design. There are also multiple tabs and screens for a mech configuration that is hard to understand. I'm not sure why the developers chose to do this, some of the design elements might have been for console concession, but it looks and feels like a huge pile of information that doesn't coordinate well. Everything appears very opaque when it comes to editing a loadout. It can be done, but's it messy and fiddly. The actual gameplay feels claustrophobic and the enemy mechs, even IS mechs, take huge amounts of damage before they start losing components or get cored, compared to MW5 Mercs. The training simpod missions seem to go on with only the ability to "Abort Mission" and no conclusion or summary. The frame rates with the graphics turned way down is off an on choppy. At times it seems fairly smooth, only for stuttering to suddenly take place. They put in a lot of foliage and environment detail that might be the cause of this. There is definite stuttering in ship sections like the barracks and "mission central". The animations stutter like crazy, not that these sections really matter, there isn't any gameplay to it. As for the actual campaign, the Clan weapons are strangely mushy in this game. Where a Flea would be nearly instantly flattened like a new driveway under focus fire of all teammates in MW5 Mercs, it can withstand the damage of clan tach in this game and keep going. Same is true for ground vehicles, Spiders, Locusts, and Jenners. It really sucks to see a light ground vehicle eat two clan medium pulse lasers at point blank and keep on moving like nothing hit them. In MW5 Merc, only a heavy ass tank would have withstood that. The developers seem to follow lore except that the weapons aren't really the killers that they are in MW5 Mercs. I don't know if the developers will be able to turn this game around, it needs a major gameplay overhaul and less focus on cutscenes. I guess buy it on sale if you're really interested, but otherwise I'd steer clear, it really isn't all that well made and doesn't play close to as good as the flawed, but fun, MW5 Mercs.