MechWarrior 5: Clans review: Thrilling mech game delivers 31st-century storytelling

It had been a long mission. Skirmish after skirmish left our mechs teetering on the edge of functionality. My machine, a massive 100-ton Dire Wolf, was missing an arm — and half my firepower with it. One final group of fresh enemies emerged, blinding flashes of laser fire and the roar of rockets filled the air. One of my teammates was forced to eject, then another as we whittled them down. Finally, it was me, barely hanging on, and one opponent who had so far avoided most of the damage. A city block separated us, the buildings temporarily halting our fire as we reached the next intersection. As we both emerged, I stared certain death down the barrels of his autocannon.

My only hope was to put all my remaining firepower directly into his cockpit and take out the pilot, an extremely difficult shot under the best circumstances. I lined up my reticle as best I could, and both mechs opened fire in the mission’s decisive salvo.

These moments stick with me from my time playing MechWarrior 5: Clans. In an age where we celebrate the emergent moments of open gameplay, Piranha Games pivots instead to a carefully curated, deliberate design structure. In doing so it delivers one of the most intense action campaigns of the year, and tells a personal, character-driven war story with a giant-robot backdrop. Not every shot is on target, but it does more than enough to deserve a place of honor on the battlefield.

All systems nominal

MechWarrior 5: Clans shares a lot of DNA with its predecessor, MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries. They are set in the same universe, though Clans begins roughly around the end of Mercenaries timeline. A lot of the underlying tech and gameplay is common between them. However, while Mercenaries is an open-ended, procedurally generated choose-your-own-adventure, Clans is a focused, hand-crafted, standalone campaign. Unlike its predecessor, it has characters with arcs, multiple acts, and a story that drives everything you do.

The first few missions are fairly straightforward as you get acquainted with controlling your Battlemech. These towering behemoths are not Gundams, darting around at ultra-high speed. Instead, they are lumbering hulks of armor and weaponry, akin to walking tanks. The steady thud of footsteps as you trade blows with other mechs, buildings crumbling around you, convey this sense of scale and power well. This is a slower-paced, thoughtful shooter. Carefully managing ammo and heat buildup while making strategic choices about what parts of which enemies to target are far more important than being the first to line up a shot and pull the trigger.

The mission design is exceptional. Once you transition out of basic introductory levels and the reigns come off, the impressive set pieces, excellent pacing, and tightly tuned encounters shine. Objectives vary from mission to mission, whether it’s attacking or defending points, investigating suspected smugglers, or chasing down stolen mechs. Unique environments, hazards, and enemies do a good job keeping things fresh. One memorable level saw my squad taking refuge from incoming artillery fire in a cave, carefully avoiding any sunlight that indicated an opening above us. Another dropped my entire team into a massive running gunfight right from the start that can best be described as Halo’s The Silent Cartographer but with giant robots.

I particularly appreciate the clear sense of progression from battle to battle. Early on, your Star (aka squad) is almost exclusively in lighter mechs. That means that tanks and VTOLS can do real damage, and a fight with other mechs is often better done via ambushes and careful positioning. As you get later in the game and move into heavy and assault-class machines, you begin to tear through smaller units, leaving dozens of broken enemies in your wake. When you and another 90+ ton mech square up, it feels like a heavyweight fight.

Even on normal difficulty, this is a tough game, and smart tactics are necessary if you want to make it far. Doling out commands is quick and easy thanks to a simple wheel. It wasn’t long before assigning targets or choke points to hold became second nature. Alternatively, you can pull out to a live satellite view called the Battle Grid. It’s an extremely impressive bit of tech and turns Clans into almost a real-time strategy game. I just wish it would pause the action. As cool as it is, by the late game I generally couldn’t afford to take my hands off the controls long enough to issue commands, so I eventually moved away from the Battlegrid for the speed of the command wheel.

You can play through the full campaign in up to five-player co-op, which is a lot of fun. All of the progression and equipment belongs to the host, and each additional player takes on the role of one of your existing Starmates. They can choose from the host’s inventory of mechs before deploying, and even apply their preferred loadouts and customization. Outside of occasional latency, I found the co-op to work extremely well, though it would be better if you could choose which pilot to control. As it is you are just sort of socketed into an available slot, with no ability to change who you are controlling, which is too bad.

Mechpocalypse now

While a 75-ton Mad Cat battlemech may be impressive, it’s useless without the person on the inside. The story smartly focuses on the titular MechWarriors themselves, spanning multiple years, as you and your rookie Star rise through the ranks of Clan Smoke Jaguar. Each of your teammates has a distinct personality and motivations, and it often feels like the 31st-century equivalent of Band of Brothers.

In this war, you are the invader. As a grunt on the field, your team is subject to the whims of leadership, good and bad. Your participation in the subjugation and occupation of worlds involves unambiguously despicable acts, and the development of the core characters from eager recruits to increasingly unwilling participants is engaging. History is filled with soldiers who were “just following orders” and the strongest narrative beats come from your Star wrestling with that. It misses an opportunity to reject the cruelty of conquest and colonialism outright, nor does it extend its lens to you as a player like Spec Ops: The Line famously did, but it’s still refreshing in a world dominated by Call of Duty and Battlefield to have characters consider if they, in fact, are the baddies.

It’s all fully voiced, with more than an hour worth of cutscenes. That’s very impressive from a studio that historically does very little of both, though there are some noticeable growing pains like uneven voice acting. Most performances, particularly Cordero Perez, are exemplary, though a few of your squad members stick out with line deliveries that are flat and awkward enough to be distracting. Likewise, the characters generally look excellent, but occasionally unnatural mouth movements break up the immersion.

It feels like there are real stakes in every mission and, without spoiling anything, your team at the end is not necessarily the one you began with. I wish there was more downtime spent with your Starmates to reinforce your emotional connection to them. There are a few subplots that play out largely off-screen that would have particularly benefitted from some time to breathe and develop. It also would have been a good opportunity to fill in details about the unique way of life of clans, like what they mean when they call people “Trueborn” or “Freeborn,” or why people get so annoyed hearing people speak with contractions.

A war economy

Between missions, you will primarily spend time aboard ships. This is where you can buy and customize mechs, manage repairs, and work on upgrades. It’s mostly a glorified menu, but it works well enough, though I do miss the opportunity to walk around in first person like you could in MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries.

As you progress through the story you earn a currency called Honor, which represents your standing in the Clan. This affects things like what Battlemechs you have access to, how many repair technicians you can employ, and how much of the post-battle salvage you get to keep. It’s simple, and a clever way to tie a basic economic element to the narrative.

Kerensky’s are effectively dollars and are earned after missions. These can be spent on new mechs and mech customizations. That makes sense conceptually, but in practice, they are kind of useless. At no point during my roughly 30-hour playthrough did I find myself actually thinking about money. I always had far more than enough to buy anything I wanted at any time. It’s better than the alternative, being unable to complete a tough mission because I can’t afford enough heavy mechs to survive the fighting would be a problem. However, if Kerensky’s didn’t exist it would not have changed my experience in any noticeable way, which is a pretty good sign that they aren’t necessary at all.

Lastly, there is an XP system for both Mechwarriors and Battlemechs themselves. It’s a good concept; these pilots should get better over time, but the execution is too limited. Everyone has six different skills that can be upgraded five times. Three are common among each, three vary by character. I like that I can increase Exra’s proficiency with energy weapons, but if I want him to focus on ballistic weapons, I’m out of luck. That’s a shame, progressing and making decisions about customizing my teammate’s abilities could be a lot of fun, but right now I’m just checking off boxes.

The BattleMech XP is more useful. Anytime a mech is used it gains XP, which can be used on upgrades. Those improvements persist for any pilot using that mech. Most are simple improvements to handling or speed. However, the real prize is the Omnipods. These are alternate configurations for each mech, and they can completely change how you approach fights. Want to sit at range and snipe targets with trio of Pulse Lasers? Done. Would you rather get up close and quickly end fights with Ultra Autocannons? Unlock that variant and ride it into battle.

You can go through and customize each mech, though the Omnipods play a role in that too. Most sections of each BattleMech have mounts for specific weapon types, and try as you might you can’t install lasers where ballistic weapons are meant to go. But if you unlock an Omnipod that swaps in an energy weapon socket to that spot, you are in business. It would be nice if there was a bit more flexibility in my mech-building like more slots to add armor to or the ability to upgrade the size/speed of my fusion reactor, but given how good the missions are and how interesting the story can be, keeping the focus on time spent in missions, rather than between them, was ultimately the right choice.

MechWarrior 5: Clans is a towering behemoth of action and storytelling worthy of its massive BattleMechs. It pays homage to its story-driven predecessors by exceeding them in nearly every way. While there may be a few cracks in the armor when it comes to pilot customization and presentation elements, the total package is excellent. This is the definitive MechWarrior game.

MechWarrior 5: Clans was tested on PC.