Mechwarrior 5: Clans review

MechWarrior is back and going harder than ever with a completely standalone game confusingly titled MechWarrior 5: Clans, some five years after MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries. Clans is a bold game that improves on the classic sim-lite action of MechWarrior by adding a more modern, story-driven framing—which succeeds at the cost of flexibility.

Clans' narrative-focused campaign lets you tweak and customize your assortment of mechs between missions which focus on skirmishes between your Star, or squad of five mechs, and the many, many enemies—mech and tank and aerospace—that you'll make along the way. You can bring up to four friends along on the linear campaign (for a total of five in co-op) as you seek to conquer human civilization—the massive and numerous neo-feudal Inner Sphere states—as the militaristic Clans, a warrior-ruled caste society that see themselves as the true inheritors of human history and the Inner Sphere states as tyrannical oppressors.

MechWarrior games have divided genre loyalties: They're shooting-first action games, and at the same time they're a simulator of a thing that doesn't exist. Clans walks this line pretty well, focusing on providing both in-depth classic simulator choices as well as streamlined modern options for controls and mech customization perfect for new learners. It even retains the kind of config files and precise tweaks that HOTAS-gripping mech jockeys like me love. Either way the sim heart still constrains and shapes the action, trying to be an honest representation of piloting a war machine weighing dozens of tons in the 31st century—a sci-fi setting that has 40 years of games and fiction behind it.

Sad little clones

That setting matters more than before. MechWarrior 5: Clans does something quite new for the series: It attempts to give you the kind of story found in the BattleTech books and novels, which have kept mech-heads invested in this world of space nobility and war machines for decades. Where before the story was confined to a few wooden characters or long mission descriptions, Clans instead impresses with motion capture performance focusing on the human characters in and behind the robots. It's not mind-blowing top tier tech, and it sometimes generates an uncanny valley effect, but Clans puts in work here to care a lot more about the people in the cockpit, their world, and the politics around them than prior MechWarrior games have.

It's a big story with a lot of major and minor characters that drew me into a game series that—with due respect to those rad '90s FMVs—was pretty much just a sim with a bit of voice acting and text before now.

The campaign follows a group of newly-proven MechWarriors just barely out of their teens, all of whom are an artificially birthed product of their Clan's genetic engineering program and its brutal training regimen that has left them as the handful of survivors from their family of a hundred experiments—their "Sibko." It's rich with recognizable characters and events plucked from BattleTech, with cinematics and story beats that reflect the personal conflicts of our main characters and that explain big-picture events in the wider world. I genuinely enjoyed it: Dialogue was at times odd or off-character or stilted, but the story is compelling enough to see through to the end. It's a good sign that I can point at particularly interesting characters or plot points I wanted to have more development and more screen time.

And though the story lacks nuance at times it's still a very compelling point of view, because you're impressionable young people on the side that are in so many ways the bad guys. Your Clan, Smoke Jaguar, is widely considered the most conservative, prejudiced, and oppressive of the different viciously militaristic caste societies that make up the Clans as a whole. These societies revere their founders and their visions of genetic purity with religious devotion, follow strict codes of battle and honor, resolve conflicts via duels, and struggle to see the cultures they're invading as worthy of understanding. The resulting clash of ideals and real-world situations is great fodder for stories in and out of the cockpit.

No clan survives

What definitely still makes up most of your time is stomping around in BattleMechs picking fights with the locals—or "spheroids" in clan parlance. Clan mechs are advanced machines far ahead of what the Inner Sphere fields, and missions will see your squad go up against many times their number in not just mechs but BattleTech's many cool ground vehicles, aircraft, and to my delight its iconic armed DropShips. Infantry are still a sorely missed component of combined arms mech combat, though, as is the extremely felt absence of the Clans' huge power armored Elemental warriors—who pop up in plot points and cutscenes but never on the battlefield.

Those two aside, for the first time in a MechWarrior game I played several missions that felt like my character was part of a proper war between armies where dozens of units for either side clashed amid the chaos of incoming artillery with aerospace fighters streaking overhead. There are set piece battles in this game I was very here for. Clans can get pretty tough even on normal difficulty: I had to figure out the best way to play each fight and eke out every bit of performance from my loadouts while playing to the Clan advantages of range, power, and speed. Miserably, though, you have to finish a mission in one go: No saves mid-mission, no checkpoint if you die at minute 29 of a 30-minute brawl.

Mechs are a pleasure to handle in Clans, with your machine's facing, throttle, and controls once again the centerpiece of combat. Even though on simpler control schemes your mech plays like an FPS character, its height and the physical placement of its guns really matter. For example, your head-height cockpit might be over a building but the chest-mounted missiles or lasers will hit the top stories rather than your enemies. It's slow-paced at times but caring about armor, facings, and managing your mech's heat output so you don't shut down is still some of the most fun sim-lite play out there.

Thanks to a host of small tweaks, some of which clearly come from the engine upgrade to Unreal 5, this is the best that handling a BattleMech has ever felt in a game. Though at times undermined by anemic sound design for footsteps and explosions, there's a real sense of weight to how machines accelerate and decelerate. It feels like each new mech you pilot has its own quirks. There's also how your weapons are differentiated: A gauss rifle and a particle projector cannon feel very different just on how fast the projectile moves and drops at distance. Short- and long-range missiles have their own very clear flight patterns to master. An autocannon you can fire and forget versus a laser you must keep on target while it fires versus the pulse laser that splits the difference feel like a clearer set of build choices than ever before. I'm playing MechWarrior for this kind of simulation fidelity, and it carries the day more than ever.

Clans also features the best physics of a MechWarrior game to date. The feeling of being in even a 25-ton "light" mech is one of awesome power as you trample cars and smash through treelines. The new physics also really emphasize scale better than prior mech games. A lumbering 100-ton assault mech plows through entire buildings a smaller mech uses as cover, and the more modern physics let you really appreciate how tumbling chunks of concrete from collapsing structures—chunks the same size as your small mech—are no obstacle for your big one.

Contact with enemy

Between missions there's a metagame of improving your characters' skills, refining your mech loadouts, and having technicians and scientists engineer upgrades for your equipment. Rather than the "lose it and it's gone" mentality that characterized previous MechWarriors, the Clans know how to replicate and improve their tech. The campaign isn't defined by scarcity, but by earning the victories in combat that will make the Clans trust you with the biggest toys and more support personnel to keep them running. It works well in co-op, with your fellow players having full access to mission selection, character customization, research, marketplace, and mech hangars. It's a nice little minigame of research and parts buying and spending salvaged supplies to go alongside the real meat of the metal: Customizing mechs.

Customization is needlessly confusing, if lore-accurate to the fiction. Clan mechs are made up of modular pods—arms, legs, chests, heads—that can be assembled into a set variety of stock loadouts or mixed and matched. Getting more time in the cockpit and experience with a mech type lets you unlock more preset pod configurations specialized in different things like lasers or missiles or recon—and therefore more possible pieces for a fully custom design. It takes a bit to get the hang of it, but once you understand how to customize them the 16 mech chassis you have access to start to feel like a very open and interesting set of choices rather than a small pool compared to the something like 50 that you could pilot in the MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries. Most—if not all—of those older mechs do appear in the campaign as enemy forces. There's no lack of variety here.

Custom tuning is enriched by how each of your characters is good at different things and has a configuration of skills unique to them. Main character Jayden is an all-rounder, but Liam, for example, is good with ECM and radar, so can do well in a recon, ranged support, or disruptive brawler mech. Mid mission you can switch freely between available pilots—though any co-op partners are annoyingly locked into a single character and mech.

Addressing a big frustration from MechWarrior 5, you also have three ways to give orders to your AI squad: via the function keys, a middle-mouse click radial menu, and from the Battle Grid interface that seamlessly pops up for an overhead RTS-style view. Your allies and the enemies' AI are still fairly weak, but the extra control gives you a lot more flexibility in positioning and tactics because you know for sure that if one weird guy in your squad is standing behind a hill doing nothing you can easily get their mech into range and line of sight.

All the improvements in MechWarrior 5: Clans balance against one big sacrifice: Sandbox play. This is firmly a story-driven campaign with a sequence of linear, handcrafted missions. There's good variety, from patrols and recon to straight-up brawls, but ultimately they're all quite linear. There's no random procedural missions, and almost never a large open field mission with different objectives to conquer at your own pace or in an order you choose. While you can go back through the story missions with all your unlocks at campaign's end via the simulator pod—and even do new optional challenges for them—you're still limited to the pre-set missions and the exact team you end the campaign with.

Ultimately I felt the tradeoff was worth it. I spent about 40 hours with the campaign before I had only optional objectives in replays to do, and though the lack of sandbox play is most felt when you're still itching for more at the end I still loved the bombastic cinematics and intimate character moments that Clans chose over endless procedural content.