MechWarrior 5: Clans

This is a hard game to recommend, I think. On the one hand, I did enjoy the story, for the most part, and I enjoyed the fact this was a singleplayer story-driven mechwarrior game. As much as I do love the HBS Battletech and the Mw5 Mercs style open galaxy, it is very nice that this is a focused experience. They should do more of these, in my opinion (I will be playing the DLC as well). The good stuff is that this is basically an improved version of Mw5 mercs, it looks and feels a lot nicer, perhaps a little less Simulationesque, but hey, that's the direction the series has been headed in. Besides, even as a kid I would change all the setting to be like this, with throttle decay and the legs moving to face the torso. The omnipod mechlab is fun to mess with and you can still make some very silly builds still, especially with the nice mix of Battlemechs and Omnimechs you get with the DLCs. There's also co-op, which I didn't use but when I played in Mw5 was very fun. The bad stuff is, well, unfortunately kind of a lot, imo. The mission design is probably the weakest part of the game, especially towards the third act of the game. It mainly starts out fine, but there are several pretty crazy difficulty spikes as you go on. I'm not necessarily an expert at these games, but I have played a lot of MechWarrior. I was cruising through the game on normal with basically zero bumps until it suddenly felt like I hit a wall out of nowhere. Missions rapidly become battles of attrition and little else as any interesting design or notion of sanity falls away as planetary militias and rinky-dink merc groups start dumping waves of Awesomes, Orions, and any other grab-bag IS heavy/assault mech at you. It's genuinely insane. There's a later game mission where you have to investigate some smugglers after taking over a planet and the smugglers come at you with 3 or 4 lances of heavy and assault mechs. The smugglers were several magnitudes better armed and armored than the actual DCMS troops defending the planet. AND NO ONE COMMENTS ON IT. I felt like I was going insane. For half of the game you're fighting a guerrilla war against insurgents yet these guys are packing Atlases and Banshees and Warhammers and wave after wave of Quickdraws and Grasshoppers and Dragons. The missions get longer and longer too, with repair and ammo bays getting fewer and further between, if at all. This would be one thing if there were checkpoints, but no, a Star wipe means starting over from the beginning of a 20 to 30 minute mission. Each late game mission felt like it went on for one encounter too long, there's always a last minute objective or lance of mechs to harass you right when you think it's over. Even the campaign does this, there's like three missions that are setup to be the final battle and then there's another one after it. Even the last boss of the last mission is a fake out, there's a whole section at the end after you beat the boss (at least on the path I chose, it might be different for the other ending). Now, I don't mind a challenge, but these long, grinding missions with few ammo options means you are basically pushed into using a laser boat that can take some heavy hits. A Warhawk with quad PPCs will carry you through most of the game, same with a Timber Wolf armed with pulse lasers. Not that those Mechs aren't fun, but I made a Rifleman IIC build with 6 LBX ACs I wanted to use, but in the one mission I took it on I was out of ammo by the third encounter with no ammo around for me to resupply with. It's just a shame. The boring missions largely had me wanting to play MW4 Mercs, with its plethora of fun and challenging missions that weren't just 'what if you had to fight a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of heavy mechs?'. You rarely get any support either, late game missions are usually just you and your star vs a planet's worth of mechs and armor. I will say though, the rare missions where you do get allies are quite fun, and the battles can feel properly epic when there's a couple lances and stars battling it out. The story is fine, I've read the novels so I kinda knew where things were headed but the star is pretty likeable for the most part, fighting a trial of position after reading about it in the novels was sick, and I thoroughly enjoyed that. My one story related gripe at the game is towards the end when [spoiler] you have to essentially choose between two starmates from your sibko, Ezra and Mia. I found Mia to be extremely annoying and was glad to be rid of her, but everyone else seemed so damn attached to her, including the player character, who seemed head over heels for her. Sorry Mia, I was glad to be able to turn your stravag ass to ash. Naomi was way cooler anyway. [/spoiler] Final thoughts, I do recommend this game, but with caveats. Know you are in for a fairly long ride and boy does it turn into a meat grinder. If you can grin and bear that part of it, it's pretty good. Here's hoping for a Jade Falcon expansion pack or game next, I demand the return of Star Colonel Aisa Thastus!

Great MechWarrior game. If you like mechs and stompy combat this is the game to play.

Great game need to save up for DLC's

More Mechwarrior at this quality is incredible. This is a golden age of Mechwarrior and I'm here for it.

tbd

Die legendäre Schlacht von Tukayyid, wo sich das Schicksal der inneren Sphäre entscheiden sollte.

Mech 5 Clans is a hard game to review. There's a lot to like and to dislike in equal measures. The game isn't well optimized and will likely never be. It loads fast on a SSD, although the animated loading screens always stutter on my end. Bless your soul if you try to play this will less than 8Gb of VRAM and a less than fairly recent cpu. It runs well on my 4090 but you can tell that's it's the hardware carrying the performances. In exchange the game looks gorgeous, the levels are lovely to move in and the particles effects will burn your retina. I thought it looked fairly similar to Mercs but going back to that, it looked a lot more bland and grey by comparison. The ai is dumb as bricks, if you played previous Mechwarrior games, you'll know what to expect. They can, however, be wrangled by the new tactical map that allows you to pause the game and issue command like in an RTS. It's still underwhelming when compared to Mech 4, which had you control up to 7 other teammates and had a good variety of orders. Mech 5 still has only move, guard, hold fire and attack orders, but they are now much more fluid thanks to the map. The story aspect is harder to evaluate. On the one hand the huge leap in quality when it comes to cutscenes with advanced (albeit uncanny at times) facial animations that bring Mechwarriors to life like never before, but on the other the dialogue, writing and characters are average at best (although compared to the abysmal characters from Mech 5 Mercs, quite an improvement). That being said, the sub text is very good. They manage to incorporate a good amount of info and world building into the characters. They each represent a different facet of the Clans and while the characters themselves are bland, what they tell the player about their society is well put together. Jayden is your average Clanner, ambitious but flexible due to his young age. Mia and Ezra are complete opposite as they embody the Crusader and Warden ideals. Liam is someone that is very aware of how Clan traditions hold them back and Naomi is a typical example of a Clanner past her prime, disillusioned and on her way to "retirement". The story itself is okay, it helps that you see these characters go from cadets to veterans in one of the most brutal conflict of the setting. Difficulty is also a mixed bag. The game gives you the tools to succeed, and you can outfit even the starter mechs with a lot of weapons (a 25 tons Kit Fox with 8 lasers? Why not) to make some crazy efficient builds. The problem is that starting out, you won't understand how all of this works, even if you're coming from Mercs, and you'll likely get torn to shreds very quickly. You will always be outnumbered and outweighed from the third mission, and you have limited time to repair your mechs between missions. There is always something that demands focus, which you split between buying new mechs, researching upgrades and leveling your pilots. You also need to recruit more scientists and engineers (think Xcom, the more the better). People that played through Mercs dlc campaigns will know what to expect, but the new players might feel pressured. The game is balanced for experimented players essentially, a newcomer will feel the sting of defeat at first. Important to note that since your pilots start off as rookies, their damage, range and accuracy will be noticeably worse in the early missions. Mission design is a lot better, with more varied objectives and settings, that being said, the old design flaw of dropping tons of enemies on you is still there. While I don't think it's a very good design, it will be made worse if you rush in. If you play strategically, force the enemies in narrow passages and lead them back to your squad that you carefully positioned earlier, then you'll find it a lot more satisfying. Mech variety was something I was worried about, as they were only 16 chassis in the base game (the dlc mechs are retroactively added to the main campaign, which is very welcome), but they drip feed them at the right pace throughout the campaign. The Mechlab may seem limited at first, but you can mix and match different body parts to create your own variant. Some people wish that the base game would be more like the YAML mod for Mercs, but I think that limitation breed creativity, and that working within constraints to achieve the best output is what makes it interesting. You can still make broken builds with a bit of experimentation. I see people taking way too long on the dreaded Sokols or falling to pieces mid mission. Again, you have to play strategically, running in a straight line is not a long term plan. Being able to output continuous damage is more valuable than a high damage value mech that can only fire every so often. you have to aim for the enemy weapons, not the center mass (which is the most armored part). Run sideways and only fight the enemy when it's not actively focusing you. With these caveats in mind, I recommend the game, although people wanting a sandbox like Mercs probably won't like this, as this a story focused, handcrafted missions campaign.

Mechwarrior Clans pretty good so far. Control your lance of mechs bringing down the Inner Sphere chuds.

Overall I would say this game is a big step forward from Mercs. The mechs feel better, you have easier control over AI with a map to send them around etc. AI could still use some work overall, but it feels slightly better. The campaigns are cool and fun, but you will want to go back to mercs after beating them because of the sandbox, once you beat the campaign there is nothing more to do. The biggest complaint most people have is UI related. Which I think is mostly just getting used to new UI. Mech customization UI is worse than Mercs though, but for doing something different with omnimechs and clan stuff in general I think it is fine.