Yahtzee recently did a video about how his opinion on his games of the year have drastically changed looking back at them retrospectively. As long time readers will know that idea has been resonating with me of late, especially with many IPs from days gone by making a resurgence. This has then thrust into light the discrepancy between what I thought I felt about a particular game and what I actually felt as it’s right there, plain as day, for all and sundry to read. So I find myself grappling with past me all the time, my definitions for what makes a game good now fundamentally different from what I held up in the past. Whilst my experience with the Mechwarrior series predates my blogging about games they still hold a special place in my memories and so I go back, this time to Mechwarrior 5: Clans, to see if there’s a spark that can be reignited. Whilst it’s not as bad as Mercenaries was it’s unfortunately not far off, meaning the IP still has a long way to go for me to consider it good.
The Clans are though who left the endless war of the Inner Sphere, casting off the shackles of their oppressors to find a new life beyond their reach. It was here, in the outer reaches, that they honed their technology and combat skills, genetically engineering elite combat warriors so that one day they might return to unleash justice upon those who had forced this exile upon them. It seemed though that many of the Clans leaders were content to just sit and wait, the inevitable combat seemingly something they didn’t want to face. That was until an Inner Sphere ship jumped directly into the core of the Clans’ star system, forcing their hand and mobilising them all to war.
Clans is, thankfully, not as far behind the curve as its predecessor was in terms of graphics but is behind what I’d consider par for most games these days. Mechwarrior games were never about the up close detail but that’s something that becomes rapidly apparent whenever you get within 20m of any of the non-mech assets in the game. You can kind of forget about this when you’re wandering the great open vistas or taking down hordes of enemies but when you’re jump jetting over terrain or getting too personal with an enemy mech the game’s sub-par assets come into painful relief. I’d forgive this if the action was fast paced enough to justify it but mech combat was never a low-TTK game and so things like this unfortunately stick out.
Mechwarrior fans will feel right at home after the game’s initial missions, the similar tropes of building your mech, selecting your mission and earning currency to earn upgrades are all the same as they ever was. There are however a number of additional upgrade mechanics that give you more general upgrades that aren’t mech specific, like pilot skill upgrades (for both you and your team) and research points that improve certain aspects across all mechs. As always you start off with very limited options at your disposal but the game progress at a fast enough rate that should you find any joy in the combat you’ll quickly find yourself min-maxing your preferred build so you can keep under the mission’s tonnage limit.
Therein lies the problem though: the combat is still boring as all sin.
I tried to get into it, I really did, but the initial waves of tanks, helicopters and other trash pose absolutely no threat to you at all. Then the mechs that come are at their most challenging when you’re trying to make sure that everyone is targeting the same one. Past that though it’s clear that the missions have been carefully crafted to be easily beatable unless you stray from the game’s chosen path for you. Do that and it’ll punish you, hard, and not in a way that’s rewarding either. So you’re left with engaging with the game in the way that it wants you to and that, unfortunately, is quite boring.
I will admit to getting suckered into trying to customising my mech build to be as OP as I could possibly manage, along with tweaking all my team’s pilot skills and matching them to their preferred mechs so that I could, you know, have fun on missions. Trouble was that didn’t really seem to make much of a difference, the standard builds seemingly being just as effective as one that was purely optimised. Could be my weak-ass theorycrafting skills or the limited pool of mech tech I had to work with given the handful of hours I put in, but if the game isn’t fun at the 4 hour mark chances are it’s not going to get there in another 4.
Of course a solid narrative can make up for those sins and the fact that I had to Google what the clan’s name was (SMOKE JAGUAR….yeah baby) before writing this review should tell you just how much of the story stuck with me. To be sure there was some solid worldbuilding in there, possibly even stuff that relates to the other Mechwarrior games I did enjoy in my younger days, but that then falls apart in the paper thin story that’s delivered to you in the most atrocious way. It definitely feels like one of those games where the voice actors weren’t given enough direction and so nothing really seems to come together. I wanted to like it, I really did, but I just couldn’t bring myself to run another mission to see if it actually started to go anywhere.
I unfortunately have to chalk up another disappointment to Piranha Games for this one, even after the bar was lowered so much by this game’s predecessor. Dated graphics, boring combat and a completely forgettable narrative leaves me with little to grasp onto. To be sure it’s an improvement over what came before, but it’s not even in the “so bad it’s good” territory that Spiders seems to play in with their wannabe Wish.com versions of Bioware RPGs. The 10 year old in me still holds out hope that one day, someone, will build a Mechwarrior game that’s worthy of the heritage I remember it for but as time goes on I think I’ve got about much chance of that happening as Titanfall 3 getting released.
Rating: 6.0/10
Mechwarrior 5: Clans is available on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S right now for $73.50. Game was played on the PC with a total of 3.8 hours playtime and 14% of the achievements unlocked.
