It’s been a hot minute since I engaged with the Mechwarrior series. And by a ‘minute’ I mean twenty-something years. Thankfully, strapping into one of Mechwarrior 5: Clans’ walking tanks felt like hopping on a bike.
While the games have expanded in a number of interesting ways over the years – including a fully-fledged narrative – the nuts and bolts remain surprisingly familiar. Turns out that Mechwarrior still delivers satisfying, weighty warfare, though Clans does come with an added layer of jank.
A Sci-Fi Spectacle Of Narrative Proportions
Of all the things I expected to see in the fifth Mechwarrior title, a comprehensive narrative was not one of them. The acting is decidedly uneven, with certain characters being voiced quite competently, while others feel like the programmers tagged in to read a few lines. Facial animations are similarly hit-and-miss. One of the first not-so-friendly faces you meet is the scar-covered Kit Commander Ibraham Ismiril, who guides you through the introductory chapter. He looks great and emotes well, but the core squad that you’ll spend the game leading are all teeth when they talk. Liam, in particular, is more molar than man. They can look and sound quite strange, which will unfortunately yank you out of the experience from time to time as you fixate on how large their teeth are.
However, despite the uneven presentation, the story largely delivers. The core cast of characters is likable enough, and provide the unfolding yarn with stakes, while the plot ratchets up nicely as the chapters progress. If, like me, you aren’t fully engaged with the Battletech lore, the role that the clans play in the world will quickly become abundantly clear.
In fact, it won’t be long before you are asking the important philosophical question: ‘Are we the baddies?’
Unlike some other recent games where you play as the villains, Clans’s cast are zealots. So, they don’t ham it up. The best way to describe them is horrifically misguided. It’s a fun angle, and unfolds in a narratively satisfying way. All of this comes together to make for an experience that is reminiscent of a B-tier, Syfy channel show that delivers the right balance between melodrama and schlocky fun. But how does it play?
Gameplay That Delivers Heft
In service of this sprawling story, you’ll take part in a number of missions that feature a wide range of objectives and goals. Between reconnaissance missions, and defending vital resources, there is plentiful variety to keep things fresh throughout, but more often than not, missions will necessitate engaging in robotic rumbles. Mechwarrior is at its best when you are mowing down mammoth mechs in glorious combat, so that’s probably for the best. The feel of these mechs contrasts starkly with something like last year’s Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon. These aren’t nimble jets with legs, zipping across and around the battlefield. Instead, they are slow, plodding, bipedal tanks. That hefty feel is the point.
Moving these mechs can be a chore, but in the best way possible. The top half of your mech can swivel 360 degrees, completely independently of your rig’s legs. Instead of accelerating and decelerating freely with the analogue stick, you’ll shift into different gears, and maintain that speed until you shift down. The control scheme isn’t intuitive, but it makes piloting your mech feel grounded in a way that few mech games do. Once I overcame the learning curve, I found that this unique feel makes combat all the more exhilarating. I can’t think of a single mech game that has managed to deliver the same sense of heft that Mechwarrior 5: Clans does.
There is a modern control scheme as well. This will remove the learning curve, and give the game a more familiar feel, but I would encourage you to give the classic control scheme a chance, as the modern controls rob players of that sense of veracity that the classic controls are able to deliver.
You won’t be controlling just one mech, either. You’ll be running with an entire squad of mech-manning mates. Swapping to the overhead map so that you can issue commands is buttery smooth, and you are free to jump in and out of any mech under your command. Thoughtful play and careful positioning are rewarded handsomely as a consequence. Especially in some of the tougher battles, as being able to circle your opponents to execute pincer attacks can be the difference between dominating your enemies and limping out of battle with mechanical wounds begging to be licked.
Tinkering With Tanks
But your time won’t be exclusively spent on the battlefield, you’ll be hunkering down in the hanger as well. Clans lets you get into the nitty-gritty with your mech, though here it feels like Piranha Games may have had their signals jammed. Each new Battlemech chassis comes fully loaded, and not in a good way.
Every chassis is at its weight limit from the outset, and the amount of wiggle room you have to customise this to your own liking is shockingly small. Even adding a tiny patch of armor to a limb ends up requiring you to downgrade a weapon, or remove a vital sensor. I have no doubt that veteran Mechwarriors are able to work within the system to build impressive loadouts that punch well above their weight, but after hours of experimentation, few of my customized mechs felt like they had been dramatically improved by any of my tinkering, and I eventually lost interest in this aspect of the game altogether. By the time I was halfway through, the most I would do was swap out pods occasionally so that I could change my weapon types.
Then again, my abandoning of the mech customization may have had more to do with how painful sifting through the menus can be. I marvel to think at how they managed to make the encounters in the wide-open combat arenas run as smoothly as they did, but weren’t able to make sifting through menus tolerable. At its worst, moving a slider from left to right sometimes takes seconds to register. That isn’t hyperbole, either. I timed it.
Not every menu is equally sluggish, though none of them feel nimble or reactive. For some reason, the menu where you assign repair technicians is easily the most painful to navigate.
Pressing a directional button twice, either out of frustration or boredom, will often skip forward multiple positions. Other times, a button press won’t register at all. Moving through menus is at its worst when assigning technicians, but navigating any of the menus in the hangar is an unpleasant experience. I can’t speak to the other versions of Clans, but the PS5 version makes menu sifting uniquely unpleasant.
Like one of its titular mechs, Mechwarrior 5: Clans is an effective machine that is purpose-built, but a touch awkward in motion. It has great moment-to-moment combat, backed up by a fair bit of tactical depth. The heft of the mechs you’ll man is palpable and helps the game deliver on its core premise. As an added bonus, the narrative ain’t half-bad either.
The flipside is that I ran into some performance issues, and the mech customization would have benefitted from a little more flexibility. The fact of the matter is that Mechwarrior 5: Clans gets most of the important stuff right. If you like the idea of manning mechs, I’d say it is well worth climbing into the cockpit.
3.5/5
MechWarrior 5: Clans
Reviewed on PS5
- Released
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October 17, 2024
- Developer(s)
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Piranha Games
- The hefty mechs feel great to pilot.
- The combat has an excellent amount of tactical depth.
- The story does enough to keep you engaged.
- The mech customization is oddly restrictive.
- The PS5 version I played had a lot of technical issues.
- The facial animations emphasize the teeth too much and make me feel uncomfortable.