MechWarrior 5: Clans review — “We are Smoke Jaguar”

The team at Piranha Games knows mech combat. Mechwarrior Online has been going strong since 2013, and they successfully rebooted the single-player experience with MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries. We enjoyed it quite a bit, with the only real gap being the thinner storyline. Six expansions built on the fantastic foundation they’d built, but the refrain was always the same – when do we get to play as a filthy Clanner? Well…it’s time.

If you’re unfamiliar, the Clans are descendants of a legendary general named Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kerensky and his generals. Commander of the Star League, he helped liberate Terra from the Usurper Stefan Amaris and ultimately worked to explore and settle the Deep Periphery, rising to the rank of Commanding General. It’s on these Periphery worlds where the 12 Clans, including Smoke Jaguar, Fire Mandrill, Hell’s Horses, Ghost Bear, Clan Wolf, and more staked their claim on their own homeworlds. MechWarrior 5: Clans starts when the unthinkable happens – an Inner Sphere ship has discovered Smoke Jaguar’s homeworld of Huntress. This act of war will not stand, triggering an all-out assault on the Inner Sphere.

MechWarrior 5:Clans is a standalone game, though one that can be played cooperatively. Where Mercenaries ran from 3015 to 3049 (the 4th Succession War), MechWarrior 5: Clans tells the story of the Smoke Jaguar and their assault on the Inner Sphere. Dubbed Operation REVIVAL, Smoke Jaguar and the combined might of the various clans that have, at one point or another, been exiled or left, the Inner Sphere are now coming to bear against the great houses, starting with my favorite – House Kurita.

One of the biggest differentiators between Mechwarrior 5 and Clans is that there is a massive focus on story in the latter. Mission briefs, over two hours of cutscenes, fully voice acted interactions in the field, and much more ensure that you are fully immersed in the lore and culture of MechWarrior. Clanners have a way of speaking, and Smoke Jaguar in specific leads a brutal life from the time they are birthed. Every moment of every day is a test, and failure can mean a painful and immediate death. I enjoyed Mech 5 quite a bit, as you can see in my review, but the lack of any real story made the core product suffer. The six expansion packs fixed that to a degree (our review of the Kestrel Lancers, for example), receiving higher scores as they further explored the world of MechWarrior, but there is a lot of lore just waiting to be explored.

I won’t ruin the storyline, because there is quite a bit to ruin, but the game starts with you and what remains of your sibkin (family members, or kin, and members of your sibco, which is short for sibling company) preparing for their trials. They are tested throughout their life in the creche, and as they approach their 20th birthday, they are brought to a training facility to either pass their Trial of Position and become MechWarriors, or fail and are reassigned as Elemental pilots, shunted to the science division, become common laborers, or just die, for example. Those who do exceptionally well in their Trial of Position may even ascend to command their own Star – a group of MechWarriors who have also completed the Trials. Yes – you will face this Trial, and Kerensky willing, you’ll pass it. If you do, you’ll be on your way to command a Star in the most important mission the Clans have ever known – an assault on the Inner Sphere.

Obviously, you do pass, joining the assault. If you are familiar with the timelines, this game jumps into Operation REVIVAL – the combined clans and their assault on the backwater worlds of the Periphery, the area outside the Inner Sphere. Self-serious, overwrought, and sounding completely insane with the signature lack of contractions that Clan Smoke Jaguar’s clan is known for, the writing could have easily been culled from any number of books. Frankly – it’s perfect. While it might be jarring for somebody new to the universe, it captures the style and feel of the novels exactly as written.

We do have to talk about the voice work. Everyone chews their lines sufficiently, and they all clearly took the homework seriously, but it’s also clear that these were recorded in order. Either my ears have become accustomed to the VO, or the actors have settled into their roles, but either way it’s best described as “heavily acted from the lower jaw”. Lots of yelling, lots of commands, and lots of growling. Frankly, I spent a lot of time laughing as, in the real world, morale, and combat effectiveness drops the more your commanders yell – something writers of all stripes seem to continue to ignore. Gallows humor gets the job done, and someday writers will understand that.

The first world to fall to Smoke Jaguar’s batchall (that’s short for Battle Charge – told you they have a specific way of speaking) is the planet of Satander. Held by pirates, it serves as the first real engagement for Jayden’s sibco. If you’re familiar with Operation REVIVAL, then you know the arc that lies ahead, with missions involving Turtle Bay, Courchevel, and beyond. Again, I don’t want to ruin the progression, so it’s yours to discover. The great news is that this already-charted path is fertile ground for the Piranha team to further expand the content in future expansions. It’s strange to say, but I’m excited to see more DLC.

Mechanically, MechWarrior 5: Clans sees a move from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5, and to great effect. The game has simply never looked better, with gorgeous cutscenes, incredible detail, and more lighting effects than you can shake a PPC at. Unfortunately, it also ushers in all the hallmark issues that Unreal Engine 5 brings with it as well. The game stutters occasionally, pop-in happens entirely too often, even on top-tier hardware, and textures that occasionally vacillate between beautiful and muddy. Most of the time, everything is great, but when it’s not, it’s obvious. The hitching doesn’t seem to be a function of the hard drive, as my Gen5 M.2 still saw this behavior. I think this is the engine, pure and simple. On a 4000 series card, you can expect to see tech like Frame Generation to drive the frame rate to ridiculously high levels, even on moderate hardware. For fun, I slotted an RTX 2080 and at 1080p had no problem hitting triple digits. Even 1440p was well above 60.

The mechs in Clans do tend to “Stackpole” quite a bit (explode in a bright blue flash as their reactor explodes, named after MechWarrior writer Michael A. Stackpole who seemed overly obsessed with mechs exploding, even though the core is actually quite protected and rarely did so), and thanks to the Unreal Engine 5 implementation over its predecessor, they look absolutely gorgeous while they do. Unfortunately, flamers tend to look terrible when they’re in your face, with jagged edges everywhere. Hopefully, flames can get a polish pass.

Heading out into the worlds you’re conquering, you’ll find a few biomes to tackle – desert, forest, cityscapes, and caves just to name a few. These often have peaks and valleys, water features, and a handful of interesting carve-outs that make for some tight quarters. I do wish the foliage and buildings were a bit denser, or there were more scripted ambush events beyond “doors opened on the hangars, here come the tanks”.

Within your Barracks, you can spend your hard-earned pilot XP on upgrades for their skills. This can help them lock on targets faster with their LRMs, evade incoming attacks more effectively, or even land more solid melee strikes. Place enough points and you can unlock affinities that act as a sort of specialization. You can get 1.1X XP earned if you specialize in a particular weight class of mech (e.g. light, medium, heavy, or assault), but you can also specialize in a specific mech as well if you’ve got a favorite. There you’d get 1.2X XP, and yes – you can stack those bonuses, so specialization can make a real difference. Matching your pilot to their mech is also important as your Kit all have specialties as well.

Every mission your characters manage to complete results in pilot XP. You’ll get a flat amount for completing it, then an additional amount for surviving without punching out. Additional XP for total skills, damage dealt (there’s a ranking assigned with Bronze, Silver, and Gold ranks of XP), a bonus for who dealt the most damage (and surprisingly a bonus for who took the most!), who had the most kills, and more.

After you pick up your pilot XP from mission completion, you’ll also get salvage. Instead of individual mech chassis, weapons, and parts, you’ll pick up more generic versions of the same. Mech Components, Weapon Components, and Equipment components are found by scanning caches in the environment, as well as the old-fashioned way — ripping them off your enemies. This does mean you don’t have to de-limb a mech to get yourself a Gauss Rifle, and it keeps the team moving. In that way it’s both a positive and a negative.

If you are the type of person who likes to strip a mech down to the myomer bundles and boating it with a ton of specific weapons, you’ll find the system somewhat limiting. The Omnipod system simplifies the mechbay work, instead unlocking variants for each major location through spending XP you’ve earned in combat. For example, this could allow you to take a section of your mech, slimming the armor, but freeing up some additional sections for additional weapons or equipment. In that same vein, however, it means you can’t rip the jump jets off, move all the ammo and double heat sinks into your feet, and shuffle the weapons off the arms into the chassis all willy-nilly. Most of the positions are locked, preventing you from removing the bulk of things. If you do want to create a variant that moves a laser off the arm and into the chest, you do that by unlocking a variant that has that position designated to that weapon type. It replaces the more complex drag-and-drop system we used in Mechwarrior 5, but it’s never been easier to move the Nova from 6 medium lasers to a Gauss rifle with a single click. You could also flip it to an LRM/Artemis IV and an ER Medium Laser as a topper if you are so inclined. This does seem intentional to keep players from having to wait while Star Commander Tinkerer tries to create the most powerful legger they can while remaining pure tech. Admittedly, I do miss killing the meat and saving the metal.

When you do return from a mission, you’ll have collected weapons, mech parts, and equipment. There are non-specific, but they are also the parts you’ll need to spend on research. Scanning various caches on the map will reveal additional parts, and you can always pick and choose what parts to collect to focus your research efforts. Research will allow you to expand things like your probe range, ER laser duration, damage, and heat, ER PPC cooldown time, Gauss Rifle projectile speed, jump jet recharge time, LRM range, and MASC cooldown time, just to name a few from a very long list. You can have as many of these going as you wish, but you only have so many scientists generating research at any given time, so it’d be better to focus your efforts. Just the same, these can be upgraded multiple times, so there’s no better time to start than now. Upgrading your science lab and requisitioning more scientists will give you additional research per cycle and generate research points, but that costs precious well…frankly I don’t know what the star icon thing is, and the game isn’t telling me with a mouseover or any sort of tutorial. Let’s call ‘em Moon Dollarydos. These same Moon Dollarydos are the same resource you’ll use to unlock new Mechs, requisition new mechanics, upgrade technicians, and more. There’s a push/pull of all resources, including your Kerenskies (that’s money in this universe), and never enough to go around.

The Moon Dollarydos is somewhat indicative of the problem in MechWarrior 5: Clans. You’re in the barracks looking at upgrading the skills of a pilot, but if you don’t remember what mech they’re piloting or where their skills lie, there’s no easy way to mouse over and reference it. Similarly, if you want to compare weapons easily, it’s a lot of backing out, looking at your mech in the bay, heading back to the store, etc. The same goes for mech customization that makes it difficult to quickly switch up your gear, making it easier to just stick with stock than fight with it.

One of the best improvements to Mechwarrior 5: Clans is that all the team members can assign skills to their pilot, tinkering with their mechs, and reading lore without making anyone else wait. This keeps the entire kit moving towards the action, with the group gathering up when the host hits the briefing. When you’re loaded up with a full Kit, you’ll appreciate that you won’t be sitting around waiting for that one last pilot to ready up.

It’s not all Infernos and Rainbows, unfortunately. There are several bugs at launch that can add some serious frustration. During one mission I was taking on a SOKOL (read: Bullet sponge VOTOL with more structure resistance than an Atlas for crying out loud) and I ran afoul of the always-shifting boundary. I don’t mind the boundaries of the mission parameters change as it drives you to where the action is happening, but it’s frustrating to have the enemy able to use this to their advantage. I ended up being counted as off-mission chasing this SOKOL as he headed out of bounds. I failed the mission as a result, but my Kitmate took him out, counting it as a success. Shrodinger’s mission completion, I suppose.

Let’s be frank – your AI companions aren’t going to win any awards for their smarts. They’ll happily walk right into your line of fire, absorbing your LBX directly into their back. I’ve also had them hanging back, losing any sense of urgency in joining the fight. The new Battle system lets you command them from a bird’s eye view, and that can be used to great effect in short bursts, but it’s more useful to correct AI hiccups than it is to command the battlefield. I hope this is an area where the game can grow, calling in airstrikes, and doing all the command-level work that a good Star Commander should be doing. Perhaps in a future DLC?

I had a few issues with crashes to desktop. We’ve had lockups and a few desync issues where mechs suddenly teleport away and back as you try to target them. Thankfully, all of this is rare – most of the time, things work and work well.

The gold standard for MechWarrior is arguably MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries, though the gunplay in MechWarrior 3 and 4 delivered big in various ways. MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries managed to revive the franchise – a franchise none of us had any hope of ever seeing again. Can Clans finally deliver on the promise that CEO Russ Bullock and his team set out to create all those years ago? Yeah. Yeah, it can.

Ultimately, there’s plenty of polish needed across the board for MechWarrior 5: Clans…with one exception. It’s the thing that Piranha does extraordinarily well – mech combat. When you poptart above a ridge and slice the arm off an incoming Hatchetman, or when you alpha strike just under that shelf on a Warhawk, killing the meat inside, it is an absolutely badass moment. When you work as a team and take out scores of Inner Sphere mechs against impossible odds, there’s just nothing quite like it. Every moment you’re in the mech is pure adrenaline injected directly into your veins as you stomp across the battlefield in your massive machine built for war. For anywhere the game might wobble, these moments make up for it in spades. Piranha Games loves MechWarrior, and that love thumps you like a Gauss Rifle ferrous nickel-iron alloy slug straight to the chest.

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