The newest game in the Mechwarrior series, Mechwarrior 5: Clans is a big step forward over Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries. As much as I enjoyed that game, the actual story was never a strong point. Even the later DLCs, while an improvement on the base game, were hampered by the core of the game being about the free-exploring mercenary career. Clans does away with that completely, going back to previous iterations of the game and being entirely story focused. There are a few points where you’ll need to choose what order to approach missions in, and one branch near the end, but there aren’t any procedurally generated missions or planets to let you just roam around on. Outside of just doing the next campaign mission, your only option is to use the simulator pod to replay older missions (with some added objectives to increase difficulty).

After a short two-mission tutorial, the campaign starts you in 3049 with the Clan invasion of Santander. It’s a big jump away from Mercenaries or the HBS Battletech game from 2018 – you’re now playing as part of the descendants of the Star League Defense Force, which left the Inner Sphere centuries ago as it fell into endless war. If this is all new to you, check out the intro cinematic for Battletech at this YouTube link – it’s the best two-minute intro to set up the setting. The tech difference between Clan and Inner Sphere mechs is huge, and the first few missions are great at showing off what happens when a technologically superior force hit some junkheap pirates.

This review is going to have some spoilers, though for veteran Battletech players nothing will come as a surprise – the Clan Invasion was written about decades ago, and the game is pretty faithful to those existing stories. If you don’t know the story already and don’t want it spoilered, then the quick TL;DR of my review is that this is a great, though not perfect game. There are a few spots it stumbles, though never significantly enough to be a problem for me, and I’ll happily recommend that anyone who likes mech games play it. If you’re buying it on Steam then skip the collectors edition – $30 isn’t worth it for an extra loadout option on the Timberwolf (unique but not good), and as of right now there’s no way to access the soundtrack outside of the game.

What I Like

This is a story-based game, and the story is absolutely where it shines brightest. Your star consists of the four surviving members of your sibko (a group of test-tube babies made from the genes of two successful clan warriors) and one older Mechwarrior who was on the verge of being relegated to the solahma units (a place where the clans stick warriors approaching 30 who haven’t made a name for themselves yet). The dynamic between four brainwashed 18-year-olds and one disillusioned late-twenties character was well used to both give exposition about how the clans work and help with the story beat that you’re not playing as the good guys (and as Clan Smoke Jaguar, you’re the bad guys of the bad guys).

A lot of the story is told through the cutscenes, which you absolutely should not skip. The acting quality is decent – this isn’t Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s not Mercenaries – there’s some stiffness in what they say that can be explained by the clan’s weird formalized grammar, and some spots where the audio mixing isn’t great and things sound a little off.

The real “problem” with the cutscenes is that something isn’t right with all their mouths. They just move weirdly – it’s like the lips are too far away from the teeth. It’s a notable step back in what are otherwise excellent looking cutscenes.

After leaving Santander, your star moves first to Turtle Bay, where you get front-row seats to an orbital bombardment of a civilian population, and then on to Courchevel where you work through two mission sets – first part of the invasion and initial pacification, then a second as you deal with an uprising that culminates in another clan, Nova Cat, fighting you for control of the world. The story splits here with a decision you’ll need to make in the mission. Both arcs will lead to the invasion of Luthien, though the actual missions you play are different depending on your choice. This isn’t the Mass Effect 3 red/blue/green choice; the two branches are actually meaningfully different, even if there are only a few missions left at that point. I’ve only played through one ending at this point (reddit reports that loading a save from before the decision and making the opposite choice can be buggy, so I’m working on a second playthrough) which I found to be a satisfactory wrap-up to the story. It’s not the full invasion, but it’s a good ending point for the main character. The game is obviously set up for DLC – I’m curious whether it’ll be an extension onto the end of the main story, or picking at other storylines.

There are 36 total missions across the four (five if you count Courchevel twice for the different sets) planets. Each mission was clearly hand-built. The environments are set up to move you from place to place and aren’t just repeating the same features over and over – while you do fight across several airfields throughout the game, each one is unique. They’re also not all just going to waypoint A, kill the enemies, go to B, kill the enemies, repeat until the end. While many missions could be summed up that way (it is, after all, mechwarrior), there are some scouting missions and interceptions that reward having a bit more speed rather than always being in the heaviest mech possible. While it’s not 100% perfect if you manage to go way off the expected path, they’ve done a good job of making sure spawns come in from dropships or out of garages rather than spawning from thin air. It just overall feels much more thoughtful than the older procedurally generated Mercenaries missions, which makes each mission much more replayable.

Gameplay is mostly similar to Mercenaries. While you can play with a controller or joystick, I recommend keyboard and mouse – there are enough controls, particularly control of your squad, that you very much need the extra buttons and precision. For anyone new to the series, it plays a lot like fast tanks – you control your movement direction separately from your weapon direction (legs control movement, and torso direction controls weapons), with some extra wiggle from your arms having a slightly wider range of motion than your torso. It can take a bit to get used to, and I recommend going into the options and toggling on Torso Counter-Rotation, which will automatically turn your torso to keep your aim point constant while you move your legs. Otherwise, when you turn your legs your torso moves with it, and you need to carefully move your mouse in the opposite direction at the same rate.

New to Clans is a more in-depth system for controlling your star. By pressing B you can open up the battlegrid, a top-down view of the map where you can select mechs and give them movement orders (by right-clicking the ground), attack orders (by right-clicking a hostile), or tell them to use a repair bay (you guessed it, right-click the repair bay). By hovering over a mech you get the paper doll that shows how much damage they’ve taken, which is hugely useful over the simple progress bar you had in previous games, and with the more detailed controls you can keep damaged mechs to the back of the fight for protection. The battlegrid controls are mostly useful for setting up fights, rather than moment-to-moment control of an ongoing fight. When you open it your mech will just keep walking straight forward, so it’s risky and costs you any damage you’d be doing while you have it open. During a fight the function keys allow you to control your star. which I found most useful by pressing F1 (select all), then F1 again (attack my target) to keep all five mechs shooting the same enemy. Ganging up on a target is the best way to reduce incoming damage, and thus keep your mechs alive.

Weapons mostly felt good with one caveat – everything that uses ammo needs more of it than you think. This game has very long missions where you’ll be fighting against dozens of opponents, and while most missions have at least one ammo crate to refill all your ammo you will still end up running out. Hotfix #2 is likely out by the time this publishes and will fix the worst offender by bumping SRMs from 90 missiles per ammo bin to 150, though LRMs and ultra autocannons are still at risk of running low. At some point in my playthrough I used pretty much every weapon and felt like they all have a place where you can pick whichever one you have a preference for and be successful with it, with the exception of machine guns that feel useless. There aren’t any infantry to kill, so there’s not much point in that weapon existing.

If you’re playing on the harder difficulty you will likely want to pick just a handful of weapon systems to stick with. Clans has once again tweaked the between mission flow – you still have a mechbay (with some differences to Mercenaries, which I’ll get into in a minute), but you also have a new Research section. As you’re Clan pilots fighting inferior Inner Sphere mechs there’s no salvage to select from any more, instead you get Mech, Weapon, and Equipment parts that get used by your scientists to research a wide variety of upgrades. There are nowhere near enough salvage parts or research time to get everything. In my playthrough on regular I put a couple points into a wide variety of weapons, often ones that overlapped, but if I was playing on hard I’d likely want to stick to fewer different weapons that I can upgrade further. Either way, make upgrading your salvage operation a priority. You want to get as many parts as you can as quickly as possible.

The mechlab is the biggest change from Mercenaries, as you’re piloting an Omnimech, which is differently customizable than the inferior Battlemech. You have no ability to customize speed, and only limited ability to customize armor – that comes from individual armor pods you can mount, taking up some of the equipment space on the mech. In exchange, each of your limbs or torso sections is based on an Omnipod – a specific collection of weapon hardpoints. Each hardpoint has different sizes available to it – one pod might have just one ballistic hardpoint that’s eight or nine critical slots of size, while a different pod might have two hardpoints that are each two slots, with remining space in the pod being generic. Pods get unlocked in full sets that correspond to pre-set mech variants, but once you’ve unlocked a set of pods you can mix and match them to your heart’s content. It’s not quite the nearly unlimited customization that the Battletech rules would allow you to do, but there’s still a lot of ability to adjust mechs to fit your playstyle, and trying to incorporate the full tabletop rules would’ve been impossible for the artists. One thing to keep an eye on is a carryover from Mechwarrior Online where different pods may have different armor values. This seems to correspond roughly to the number of available hardpoints, so a pod that only has a couple small weapons has more armor than one that has a lot of weapons or one really big one. While this does make sense in some areas (like the Summoner torso, where one side torso has a giant missile pod that bloats the hitbox and makes it take more damage), I’m not sure that it really needed to be done in a PvE game, and the UI isn’t very clear about it happening.

Pod unlocks are bought with mech XP, which you earn both for deploying them in missions and accomplishing milestones (things like killing 20 heavy mechs). You can speed up XP gain by bringing multiples of the same mech on a mission, and you do gain some XP (roughly 1/10th the amount) from replaying missions in the simulator – which also counts for the milestones. If you’ve just unlocked a chassis and want to pick up some new pods before your next mission, replaying one or two missions in the simulator can get you there. That mech XP also gets used for doing chassis upgrades. Each mech can have acceleration, top speed, reverse speed, torso twist speed, torso twist amount, and turn speed upgraded. While none of these are huge boosts, they do add up. I prioritize turn speed and torso twist speed, as when you’re outnumbered being able to turn to hit new targets quickly is very useful.

Outside of upgrading your mechs you’ll also be earning XP for each pilot, which goes towards a set of six skills they have. All your pilots have three core skills – melee damage (worthless), evasion (certainly the most useful), and turn speed, and then an additional three weapon or equipment skills. By end game these are pretty substantial buffs to specific types of weapons, so keep an eye on what each pilot has when designing mechs for them to drive.

What I Don’t Like

The UI is the biggest issue I have with the game. While I’m happy with the functionality of the mechbay or the battlegrid, both of them are clunkier to use than I think they need to be, and I’m on a keyboard and mouse. I can only imagine the pain of navigating them with a controller. I think the battlegrid, in single player, needs to slow time a bit and give you more room to figure out what’s going on and assign orders, as well as allowing you to at least control movement of the mech you’re piloting. The mechlab is the biggest UI offender, where everything’s been split up into far too many screens. Mercenaries let you edit your entire mech at once, while Clans requires you to go into a separate screen per limb. When you’re just playing around and trying to sort out a new configuration, it ends up with a lot of back-and-forth that slows the process. The ability to swap out individual omnipods rather than full sets is also stuck inside the individual limb, and I’ve seen people being surprised that they’re able to do it as it’s never made clear.

Another spot that’s somewhat emblematic of the strange UI decisions is in the barracks, where you upgrade pilots and use the simulator to replay old missions. Unlike everywhere else in the UI, you access the pilot upgrades by actually clicking on the pilot – there’s no button sitting somewhere to click on and bring that menu up. The simulator pod is also accessed by clicking on it (it’ll glow when you hover your mouse over it, but there’s no label on it until you do). There’s a small button down in the bottom corner of the screen for the simulator, but on bigger monitors it’s pretty easy to miss.

My next biggest issue is probably with the economy of the game. You’ve got two main resources – Kerenskies (basic currency) and Merit, and one of those you’ll probably never pay attention to after the first couple missions. While it gets used to purchase equipment, you’re earning hundreds of thousands to millions per mission, and buying new equipment is a few ten thousand most of the time. It can get used up by purchasing additional mechs, but as you get one for free with each unlock you likely aren’t ending up spending much on them. I finished the game with multiple Timber Wolves, Warhawks, and Dire Wolves and still had over 50 million Kerenskies in the bank. It just felt like an added layer of pointlessness that didn’t really affect my game at all.

Merit gets used for unlocking mechs and upgrading your salvage, research, and repairs. You get a pile of them every time you level up, which is coincidentally the same time as you get the ability to use merit to unlock a new mech, so you can never find yourself in a position that you can’t afford to unlock the mech. After unlocking a mech you’ll need to choose whether to upgrade salvage, research, or repairs. My suggestion is to prioritize salvage. You can max it within your first couple levels, and I found having enough salvage to be a bigger limiter than time when doing research – getting more salvage early on won’t go to waste, but having more research capacity than you have resources to use for the research is a waste. When upgrading your repairs, keep in mind that each mech can only have 5 technicians at a time. Unless you’re taking a lot of damage across your entire star, adding more techs won’t necessarily help you fix things faster.

The AI is also still trash. While it didn’t significantly affect my fun, my AI starmates were pretty constantly running in front of my guns and everything tends to gravitate towards a zero-range furball, even when a mech is equipped exclusively with long range weapons (fortunately, as Clanners, even LRMs don’t have a meaningful minimum range). I do think it’s an improvement over the Mercenaries AI, as I saw pilots using all their weapons reliably, but they don’t do things like deliberately move into bodies of water for increased cooling and spend a lot of time missing static targets.

Co-Op

Much like Mercenaries, a big draw is being able to play with your friends – now with five total people. From what limited time I’ve spend with co-op it does seem to work OK, though there are still some bugs to hammer out – it’s not clear from the game loading screen which player will piloting which mech (you can tell from comparing join order to the numbered mechs, but that’s a pain), and players can jitter around terrain some if the host has an imperfect internet connection, but it does mostly work and co-op does seem to be a priority for the hotfixes.

Final Thoughts

If you like mech games, pick this up. If you’re on the fence about it, pick it up on gamepass. While I do think at this exact moment Mercenaries might have longer legs due to the sheer amount of content modders have already added, the actual mission design in Clans is so much better that the main gameplay loop of getting in a mech and shooting some enemy mechs feels a whole lot better and more replayable. Clans is supposed to be getting mod support at some point, so I’d expect it to pick up most of the mechs from Mercenaries and MWO, and I’m excited to see what extra content we get out of DLCs.

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