MechWarrior 5: Clans – Review and 1st Impressions

The Founder. Freebirth. Batchall. Dezgra. Isorla. Sibko. Surat. Touman. Trueborn. Bloodname…
Operation: REVIVAL. 

The Children of Kerensky are coming home, and WE get to play our part. 

Welcome to MechWarrior 5: Clans, and I would like to take you through both first impressions and a “mostly” spoiler-free review of PGI’s latest release. I am Target Practice, and this is Shenanigaming. 

To start, the minimum system requirements are not particularly rough for entry: 80 Gigs of storage, a GTX-1060 or RX-590 gpu, and a broadband internet connection for download. Comstar being Comstar, your download mileage may vary. 

It is up to you to choose how you would like to drive your big stompy machines, because Joystick, HOTAS, Controller, and Mouse/Keyboard are all supported. For your ocular pleasure, NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR are both supported. 

Speaking of ocular pleasure, the game is simply gorgeous. After over sixteen hundred hours of stomping around in the procedurally generated lands of MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries (a significant percentage of that being modded to hell and back) it is a very fresh feeling. More reminiscent of the older MechWarrior games where you follow a winding series of navpoints through a greater area versus the vast wide emptiness of ‘going one place and doing one thing’ vanilla MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries could bring. 

The characters range from memorable to milquetoast. Again, your mileage (and opinion) may vary… but you are a cog in a very… very… big… war machine in this game and setting. Additionally, sorry yet not sorry, there are aspects of the narrative that will ***always*** come first.  

[Sorry, Phelan Ward aspirants. Your time will eventually come.] 

Speaking of futures foretold, as soon as your newly minted MechWarrior gets officially added to the Smoke Jaguar touman, you can see everything the game has for you: all the mechs, all the equipment, all the armaments. Some are locked behind one of the two in-game currencies, one being Honor (because how could a game about the Clans NOT have an Honor system of some type?) … But the cash, the money, the material wealth, the things that the individual members of the Clans simply have no need of? It is the “Kerensky.” No, I am not making this up. The Clans are largely a cashless society, most members of the clan castes receive work credit, and can use those credits to “purchase” goods. It is the Merchant Caste who handle the Kerensky for inter-Clan dealings. It makes one wonder who we are buying this equipment from… 

Tangents aside, the glorious stompy stomp mech action that MechWarrior 5: Clans brings is fluid, rich, and polished. Flamers look downright terrifying, and the nature of the lore plays right into everyone’s mech power fantasy…  rolling into the inner sphere with technology centuries beyond those who would fight back against the inevitability of the Clan Invasion… or against those who would be ground down under the boot of the Clan War Machine. 

For those solely familiar with Table-Top/A Game of Armored Combat, you will notice a bit of balancing changes between some of the CombatMath numbers you are familiar with and those you see in-game. Armor values are doubled by default, and ammo counts have a sizable multiplier added to them. Heat values are close, yet not straight from the charts… although we are dealing with a per-second heat dissipation versus a per turn environment, and rate of fires adjust the math that is “under the hood.” 

For those MechWarriors who have experience with MechWarrior Online or MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, these changes are nothing new. You are old frenemies by now. 

My largest worry about the game prior to release was the Mechlab. Dealing solely with omnimechs, all with decades of lore and data, I feared that we might lose some of the Table-Top “crunchiness” of how these giant stomping war machines are constructed. 

I am incredibly happy to say that my worries were unfounded. PGI took lessons learned from their Clan Omnimechs entrance into MechWarrior Online and gave us a quality finished product. Alas, it is NOT our tried-and-true Critical Chart that many are intimately familiar with… on the surface. Omnimechs are now just more… modular for your hot swapping of hardpoint needs. There is some limiting of hardpoint *size* that may chafe some players, but truthfully, I do not have any sizable complaints. 

Replacing payout, reputation, and salvage rights are the new game mechanics: research, technicians, and salvage operations. 

Research and salvage operations are a joined pair: one cannot happen without the other. Research uses multiple resources: science points and salvage to give global modifiers to your equipment, one upgrade at a time. Salvage operations are straightforward, the more members of that team you have scouring the battlefield when you are done stomping, the more knickknacks & bits they come home with. Your science team generates science points per cycle, per member. Spend those points along with some of those bits your salvage ops came back with, and forevermore will your tech be shiny and chrome leading you to Valhalla. *ahem* I mean, bringing you along the Clans righteous and destined path to Terra. Of note, research points are generated into your active science projects, you cannot bank a ton of science and spend it willy nilly. 

Technicians are a pleasant change from our past years of throwing both c-bills and time at a mechbay for repairs. Each technician can affect a certain amount of repair during your downtime. Have enough techs and a cored mech can be field ready before your next drop. Not enough technicians and too much damage across your whole star that last drop, quiaff? Aff. You are dropping with damaged goods. The Clan War Machine waits for no one, and we are but cogs in the machine. Fortunately for all of us, it is a very efficient machine, because any mechbay actions, from Omnipod swaps to weapon hardpoint changes, are effectively instantaneous… you just pay for any equipment you did not have in your inventory. That efficient machine is always stocked, always one click away, and always ready for you to serve it. 

There are multiple pools of experience points for multiple things. The campaign has its own XP pool, giving you unlocks in the Mechbay. Your Star members gain individual XP each, based on their performance in the field. Those experience points may be spent on one of six pilot skills. Every pilot enjoys the skills of Melee, Evasion, and Handling, but the other three skills are pilot specific. Overlap occurs, but it does assist in giving the members of your star a bit more flavor. Or something for the min-max’ers to enjoy. Your choice. Gain enough skill levels for a pilot, and you can gain an affinity for a pilot… be it a mech chassis or a weight class. 

Alongside the members of your Star, the Mechs you choose to pilot also gain experience. Each mech has its own pool and can be used to tweak the performance of that individual chassis. Ranging from acceleration increase to how far that mech chassis can torso twist, the more time spent in a mech will translate to being able to squeeze the maximal performance out of a machine. 

Good news, MechWarrior, unlike Alvor… your star mates do not permanently die when they charge off to fight the Dragon. Alvor was not essential. Your star mates are. Should battle tactics go awry or some dezgra freebirth get a lucky shot in, the ejection systems in our mechs are top notch. Medbay is not a word you will use today, praise the Founder.  

And Honor being the loftiest goal and highest aspirations for members of the Clans, let us address the Clan Elephant in the room. Short form? Honor is just another resource. Finish a mission? Gain some honor.  

Honor is where you unlock each new mech chassis. On the plus side, with each unlock you get one stock model into your mechbay, free of all other charges. You may also spend Honor for more of (or improving your) technicians, scientists, and salvage team members. 

From batchalls to trials of grievance, these are narrative tools… and you, Star Commander, are subject to the narrative. Your honor is gained solely on the fields of battle, chosen by those who may bid on your action or inaction at the discretion of their whims. 

But the narrative. Oooooh, that narrative. Sure, many of us know it via countless resources to some degree… but paired with the artwork and the cutscenes? Khan Leo showers addressing the Grand Council? Ooof. Bring me my Comstar BattleMech. 

So down to the nitty gritty… outside of some people needing to tweak their graphics settings here and there for a smooth experience, PGI gifted us a finished product right out of the proverbial box. This being the narrative driven side of the MechWarrior 5 coin, there will be many who would wish for a sandbox experience option. Notwithstanding time allotted to the mechbay, estimates of mid twenty hours of gameplay can be expected. Three difficulty settings are available: story, normal, and hard… and I can anticipate many will attempt their second playthrough on hard. Your AI star-mates are not useless, and they are vastly different from the initial bumbling lance-mates we started with when MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries dropped. Could this game be expanded via content updates and DLC? Easily. Will the online community chip in and add interesting things, either inspired or dezgra? Indubitably. 

To top it all off with a bow on top, this game is welcoming to all comers, be they old grognard veterans from the early FASA days to someone completely new to the setting. 

Would I have wanted more? Of course! But am I happy with what I got? Abso-stomping-lutely.