MechWarrior 5: Clans Review
Like the joy you feel when a gauss rifle shell slams into an enemy mech’s cockpit, MechWarrior 5: Clans hits hard – but it can also frustrate like fighting an Atlas while missing an arm. On the one hand, it’s an engaging, mechanically excellent mech combat sim that nails all the customization and intricacy you’d expect from this walking tank series. Few things are more satisfying than coring an opponent’s mech with a single volley from a pair of gauss rifles at range, or tweaking your own mech until you get the perfect combination of weight, armor, and weapons to match your playstyle. Clans’s campaign story (which can be played solo or with up to five players in cross-platform co-op) also lands some haymakers that explore big ideas and tackle tough subject matter. On the other hand, it’s a game beset by bugs that stand in the way of total victory. But when I rolled credits after my 25-hour playthrough, one of my first thoughts was “Man, I want to play this again.”
Clans sees you take up the role of Jayden Smoke Jaguar, a young MechWarrior who longs to make a name for himself in both the Smoke Jaguar Clan and his squad, Cobalt Star. Shortly after taking command, your team is suddenly thrown into the Clan invasion of the Inner Sphere. Your ultimate goal? Achieve glory for the Smoke Jaguar Clan and reclaim Terra, the birthplace of humanity. It’s your destiny, and the destiny of Smoke Jaguar, the greatest of the Clans. (Well, according to your superiors in the Smoke Jaguar Clan, anyway.) It’s an interesting group of characters, and while the plot does take a minute to hit its stride, it remains compelling even in that early going.
You don’t need to have played any other MechWarrior games to get the gist of Clans’s story – not even MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries – but general familiarity with the BattleTech universe will go a long way toward helping you follow why contractions are a no-no and “freebirth” is a slur rather than a new Final Fantasy 7 game. I won’t (sorry, I mean I will not) go into great detail here because I think Clans’s story about an ambitious young mech pilot’s ethically perilous crusade to reclaim Earth for its eugenics-happy overlords is worth experiencing fresh, especially if you’re not already familiar with this chunk of The Lore™, but it’s not afraid to ask some big questions about the nature of propaganda, war, morality, honor, sacrifice, the responsibility soldiers bear for carrying out orders they know to be wrong, and the human cost of conflict on a galactic scale. This is a war game, and to its credit, developer Piranha Games doesn’t shy away from the subject matter that comes with that.
Clans does an effective job of immersing us in its dystopian sci-fi society’s propaganda. You’re told, through briefings, mid-mission dialogue, and some of the most visually stunning, well-animated cutscenes I’ve ever seen in a video game, that Smoke Jaguar is the greatest of the Clans, that reclaiming Terra will free the people living there from the yoke of tyranny, that what you are doing is right and good and proper, and that conducting yourself honorably in battle matters above all. But is it true, or is Smoke Jaguar blowing smoke? Are you heroes, or are you the baddies? You can probably see where this is going from the jump, but watching these characters go on this journey and grapple with the nature of full-scale conflict is still compelling.
Some missions meld story and gameplay so intricately it made me sit forward in my chair.
There were missions where story and gameplay melded so intricately that they made me sit forward in my chair. I have rarely had such a visceral reaction to missions I’ve played in a video game, and Piranha has done a great job of nailing what makes the MechWarrior universe tick by not shying away from the realities of what war, especially wars of conquest, are. To paraphrase a great quote from Apocalypse Now: “We train young men to drop fire on people, but we won’t allow them to use contractions while they’re piloting their mechs because it’s obscene.”
And with the exception of a couple of weak (but by no means bad) links, the voice cast does an exceptional job of capturing the emotion and, oftentimes, awkwardness (remember, they’re essentially a bunch of homeschooled kids born and bred for war) underlying these characters. Jayden and Galaxy Commander Cordara Perez, in particular, stand out because of how well the actors playing them deliver their lines.
If I have one complaint here, it’s that I wish we got to spend more time with these characters between missions. Most of their arcs are clearly defined, but there are a couple of major events that just kind of… happen off-screen, and I would have liked to see them explored more deeply. It’s also true that Clans takes a minute to get going (there’s a lot of setup here), but once it does, it’s genuinely compelling and the payoff is excellent. There’s even a major decision near the end that drastically changes what happens during the last few missions, which greatly contributed to my desire to jump back in for another run. Of course, you can replay any mission without starting a new game if you’d prefer, but I’m interested in experiencing the whole story again.
The actual mechs-and-potatoes of this series is the missions you deploy on and achieve your objectives within, heading back to your ship afterwards to customize or swap out your mech, research upgrades, and train up your pilots. There’s a ton of variety here, whether you’re defending a captured base from attack, trying to sneak past enemies on a stealth recon mission, fighting a knockdown, drag-out brawl with squads of other mechs, or trying to capture an entrenched position. What’s more impressive is how many missions Piranha manages to fit into Clans’s runtime without any of them feeling dull or repetitive unless they’re supposed to for story reasons. Like I said, my playthrough took me about 25 hours; there’s a lot to do. More importantly, almost all of it is memorable and unique. This is a long game, but you won’t be bored, and you can always replay your favorite missions later on and try to complete additional challenges, whether that’s finishing them in a certain amount of time, or while your mech is under a certain weight limit.
It plays wonderfully, whether you’re using a controller, like me, or you’ve been a fan long enough to be married to a mouse and keyboard, and there are classic and modern control styles to choose from. The former emphasizes throttle control and moving your mech’s legs and torso independently, while the latter resembles a more traditional shooter. Both work well, and there’s no right or wrong answer. Controlling these metal beasts takes some practice, though, because even the lightest mechs take time to slow down, reverse, and turn, so positional awareness is key.
How you play will likely be determined by your loadout. If you’re rocking a ton of small to medium lasers, autocannons, or short-range missiles, you’ll probably want to be in the thick of things, but if you’re using a gauss rifle, long-range missiles, or larger lasers, you might want to sit in the back and wage your war at range.
All of the weapons in Clans feel amazing.
All of the weapons in Clans feel amazing: whether you’re watching your heavy mech lurch backwards from the recoil of a gauss rifle, trying to time your autocannon shots so you’re maximizing your fire rate and avoiding jams, managing the heat generated by your lasers, or just determining which enemy is going to bear the brunt of your missiles, you’re always making interesting choices in combat. When you land a particularly difficult or well-placed shot, it looks, sounds, and, if you’re on a controller, feels spectacular.
You’ve also got to manage your ammo (provided the weapons you’re using require it) and your mech’s durability. Lose too much armor, and you’ll start taking structural damage. Take too much of that, and you might lose an arm and the weapons mounted to it, crippling your ability to fight. Or maybe you lose a leg, and your mobility goes down. And if the enemy manages to break through the armor defending your core and land a good hit or two? Say goodnight, Gracie.
Missions will occasionally have mech repair bays that you can use to patch up your (and your squad’s) armor after tough fights, but you can’t count on them. Some missions just don’t have them, and when they do appear, they’re a limited resource. That means your best approach is always to mitigate the amount of damage you’re taking, and avoid exposing weak parts of your mech to the enemy. It’s a cool system that encourages strategic play. It’s always heartbreaking to lose a weapon, but I felt like a true Star Commander when I managed to fight my way to a repair bay without losing anything while at low health.
Of course, these systems don’t just apply to you. If you know how the mechs you’re fighting are built, you can target the appropriate parts of their “bodies” and eliminate their biggest strengths. A Catapult’s shoulder-mounted missile launchers can tear you to shreds if you’re not careful, but it’s a lot less scary when you blow both of its arms off from a distance. Meanwhile, if one of your squadmate’s mechs loses a leg, it’s going to have trouble keeping up with you and you’ll have to strategize accordingly to avoid fighting at reduced strength. Making the right calls in the moment matters, and I love that I was rewarded for picking my spots and recognizing where the threats were at any given moment.
Fortunately, Clans gives you all kinds of tools to adjust your tactics on the fly. You can use the BattleGrid, a top-down map of the area showing terrain and any enemies you’ve spotted, to issue more complex marching orders to your squad, making sure your injured mechs hang back while your healthy ones take the front line. When you can’t risk entering a full-screen menu mid-combat (the action doesn’t pause), there’s also a radial menu (or a series of options bound to the function keys on a keyboard) to command units individually, which gets the job done in a pinch when you want to target things in your direct line of sight. You can even switch to directly controlling the other members of your squad if you get bored of Jayden or if he goes down.
Even more options await under the hood. Want increased cooling speed? You can overcharge your mech and get it, but it means you’ll damage yourself (and even explode) if you overheat. That risk can be well worth taking if the alternative is getting beaten up anyway because you couldn’t take out enemy targets fast enough. Having so many ways to customize how you want to play rules – it ensures you’re always in control of your squad and making important, on-the-fly choices, even if you’re playing solo.
You’re always in control of your squad and making important, on-the-fly choices.
Speaking of choices, let’s talk mech customization. There are 16 types of mechs in Clans, divided into light, medium, heavy, and assault categories. The Viper, which I started with (and is still one of my favorites), is a 40-ton mech; She’s fast for a medium-weight and has access to a large amount of firepower if you build her right, but she’s not the most durable thing on the battlefield. When I need a heavier hitter, the Mad Dog is my go-to for 60 tons of missile and ballistic fury. The iconic Timber Wolf, on the other hand, is a 75-ton heavy mech with firepower for days and the ability to go toe-to-toe with a much larger chassis if you play her right – to paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson, it’s my choice for when I absolutely, positively, have to kill every mechaf___er in the room. She’s endlessly customizable – I put two shoulder-mounted missile launchers on it, a gauss rifle, several lasers, and still had enough slots left over for ammo and some extra armor to pad my arms. Nice.
But you won’t see that level of customization on the Shadow Cat, which only has three prebuilt Omnipod Loadouts and fewer options overall as a result – but in exchange it’s reasonably fast, can use its jump jets to go quite high, and carries a large load for a medium mech, which means it can equip heavy weaponry like my beloved gauss rifle. And then there’s the Dire Wolf, a 100-ton monster that is essentially just a heavier Timber Wolf that will dogwalk just about everything in her way, albeit slowly. By the end of Clans’s campaign, my squad was running five of these monsters. That’s a nice army you have there, freeborn – it’d be a shame if five Dire Wolves happened to it.
Clans doesn’t give you the freedom of something like Armored Core, but you can still build a lot of cool things. One of my co-op partners built a mech that ran 12 lasers and overheated as soon as it fired… unless it was standing in water to lower its heat buildup, in which case it killed basically everything we ran into in a single shot. Big Chungus, my Dire Wolf, ran two gauss rifles, an ultra autocannon, two heavy lasers, and a missile launcher. She was good at every range, and her gauss rifles could core smaller mechs in a single volley. My other buddy’s Executioner, RIP in Peace, was essentially a sniper that fired three pulse lasers for long-range engagements, but could fall back on four lasers to cover the mid-range and a couple machine guns for close encounters.
But wait, MechWarrior! There’s also a ton of pilot skill upgrades, mech chassis improvements, and stat-boosting research options to save for and acquire between missions. You’ll even have to manage your repair technicians to ensure your mechs are in good shape, recruit scientists to speed your research, and choose which types of mechs you’d like your pilots to specialize in, which grants bonuses if they then use them in the field.
This might sound like a lot (and it is), but it’s also fairly easy to manage. You may have to make some tough choices — what affinity do I upgrade for this pilot? Whose mech is going into combat without being fully repaired because we don’t have enough technicians? What upgrades should the scientists prioritize? — but that’s part of the fun. You’re going to spend as much time tinkering in menus as you do stomping around on the battlefield, and that’s good. MechWarrior is about customization, right down to the paint job, and I love how many things I could tweak.
You can also play the entire campaign in up to five-player, cross-platform co-op. That’s awesome, and my favorite parts of Clans were when I played it with my friends. Unfortunately, co-op play also comes with a lot of problems at the moment. First, your friends can’t manually choose which pilots they’re using when they join you, which is bad because they’re all good at different things, and that can affect what you build around. Sometimes, the first person to join me would get Mia, who specializes in ballistic weapons. Sometimes, it was Ezra, who mostly focuses on lasers. My guess is that this is a bug, but we never entirely figured out how the system worked. After about 10 hours of playing together, my friends were (understandably) attached to their pilots because they’d built their playstyles and mechs around them, so that’s an issue. We had to leave and reform our co-op group several times to get everyone in the right place, and that feels almost as bad as taking a shot from four PPCs. (Real ones know.) Worse, If we ever had to restart a mission, everyone but me would often find themselves playing a different pilot and piloting a different mech than on the first run.
Co-op is the best way to play, but it also has a lot of bugs at the moment.
Co-op play also has desync issues. On one mission, we were supposed to be fighting a gunship that was circling the area we were trying to defend. It worked fine for me, but for my friends it was either floating completely still in the air or hovering miles away. To them, it looked like I was shooting nothing, and the mission was much, much harder as a result. Because I was the party leader, I could switch to another mech at any time if I died, but they couldn’t. If I died, no biggie, I’d just swap to another mech and we’ll finish the mission. If they died, it meant they were sitting there waiting for us to finish, so when that happened we generally just restarted the level instead (which meant backing out, reforming the party, etc).
Don’t get me wrong; I really do love Clans’s co-op. I’m so happy it’s here, and it’s the best way to play. But these issues suck. Piranha has announced plans for a patch that will address co-op bugs at some unspecified time “in the coming days” after launch – but without being able to test those fixes, it becomes much harder to recommend diving in right now if you’re planning to play with friends because those were incredibly frustrating road blocks.
A solo run would be a good warmup while you wait, but I also ran into a few bugs when playing alone. Sometimes, my laser effects wouldn’t appear when I fired them, even though they were doing damage. Another time, in a very long, very late-game mission, Clans didn’t recognize that I was destroying an objective, so I couldn’t progress and had to do the entire mission again. It’s a good thing I enjoy this game enough to want to replay it from the start, or that would have really been a drag.
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