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- Piranha Games
- Piranha Games
- Piranha Games
- Piranha Games
MechWarrior 5: Clans
Released On: Oct 16, 2024
79
6.5
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 19 Critic Reviews
79
84% Positive
16 Reviews
16 Reviews
16% Mixed
3 Reviews
3 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 19 Critic Reviews
79
84% Positive
16 Reviews
16 Reviews
16% Mixed
3 Reviews
3 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
MechWarrior 5: Clans brings the series’ mech combat formula closer to perfection. Players have access to a wide range of Smoke Jaguar mechs to customize and take into battle as they take on Inner Sphere tanks, complete lances, SOKOLs, and even a dropship. The action looks and sounds good and even the story, built around Jayden and his four comrades, is solid. Gamers who can find four friends can tackle the entire campaign in coop. MechWarrior 5: Clans could use some extra encounter variety but it nails the tension and excitement of pitting a Timber Wolf against an Atlas.
MechWarrior 5: Clans takes the core of its predecessor and expands upon it by giving you on interesting cast and story to explore alongside the combat. Though some of it might be overpowering at first, you’ll find a lot to enjoy, despite the challenge of some of its missions.
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 33 User Ratings
6.5
45% Positive
15 Ratings
15 Ratings
30% Mixed
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
24% Negative
8 Ratings
8 Ratings
User Score
Mixed or Average
Based on 33 User Ratings
6.5
45% Positive
15 Ratings
15 Ratings
30% Mixed
10 Ratings
10 Ratings
24% Negative
8 Ratings
8 Ratings
PSA: Most of my performance issues disappeared after Huntress. This is 1hr into the game at most, so might wanna try till then.
Good:
-Story. Mostly accurate to lore and the story of your star is well written in. Some dumb dialogue every now and then and the facial animations are weird at times, but mostly the story and cinematics have been great and engaging.
-Gameplay (for the most part). Omnimechs are fun to use and you feel overpowered as you should. The mechlab takes some time to get used to, but it works well for them.
-Missions. They dont feel repetitive like in mercs and the scenery is really nice.
Bad:
-AI. Is still dumb as bricks sometimes, although much better than in mercs.
-Enemies. There are some bullet sponge enemies. Not many, but annoying to deal with each time. Sometimes you are overwhelmed with enemies which is kinda lore accurate but gets annoying at times. Also feels like tanks get tankier the further you get in the campaign which is just dumb.
-Performance and bugs. These are fixable. Like I said most of my issues disappeared after Huntress. However, some still persist. Flamers drop my FPS greatly and enemies sometimes move like 2d sprites in original Doom for some reason. Random FPS drops are there but nothing as major as in tutorial planet.
Neutral:
-Star management system outside missions. These feel a bit unnecessary especially the RPG style XP system for mechs and pilots, but they work really well in the game so I cant say if they're that bad or good. A very subjective thing. I dont mind it. Also, salvage has been turned into a research system that upgrades your mechs. Obviously none of this is very lore accurate but it's a fun little thing that spices up the gameplay a little.
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At the end of the day this is an approachable and enjoyable entry into a genre that doesn’t really get a lot of love these days. If they manage to optimize things enough to fix the performance issues you could probably consider it a 9 from me, but as it is I can only mostly recommend it.
MechWarrior 5: Clans surprised me with its excellent campaign, carried by a thoughtful, well-told story, great mission design, fantastic walking-tank combat, and all of the customization you could want. I genuinely loved playing Clans, especially in co-op, and several story moments and missions will stick with me for a long, long time because of the way they simultaneously made me consider the ethical questions of war while grouping my rockets and lasers to obliterate a target and turning my damaged armor out of harm’s way. I just wish my first playthrough hadn’t been so buggy, especially in co-op. If Piranha’s promised post-launch patches can fix its issues, Clans will have a lot fewer frustrating lows to drag down its many impressive highs – but one way or another, I’ll definitely be suiting up for the Smoke Jaguar Clan for another run in the future.
MechWarrior 5: Clans does a good job of balancing story, combat, and the all-important time in between. Customizing the mechs and gearing up the squad are both lots of fun and the battles themselves are appropriately oversized. The narrative is a bit reliant on overly familiar war story tropes and the battles themselves can get slightly repetitive. Overall, MechWarrior 5: Clans is a solid entry in the franchise and a more-than-equal partner to Mercenaries.
The accessibility and approachability of MechWarrior 5: Clans then, may come at a cost – at least for now. It may just however, lead to a mainstream rejuvenation the series so sorely deserves, and with its launch into Xbox Game Pass, bring a whole new generation into our Sibko.
A solid campaign and realistic BattleMech combat with heaps of customization elevate Piranha Games' latest MechWarrior title.
As a Battletech fan since 1997, I appreciate and love for the BT lore and all the small details from the developers. Feels really cool to be a part of the events, you've read in the books.
Gameplay-wise, it's the same big stompy robots as in MechWarrior 5, but it feels more polished than the original game.
Must play, if you are a fan of this genre.
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PC
its a 7/10 .. so why not higher?
MW:5 Clans has to compete not only with Mechwarrior 5, but also with Mechwarrior 5+ mods, a whole lot of mods .. some of them of very high quality.
So .. we had Clan mechs for a while now of course, because the basegame allows full modding .. and importing Clan mechs is a given.
What is different? .. It is singleplayer with a fully imagined and mostly well done story. Compared to the story of the main game (i call it that, it is not..) .. it is a MUCH better story. You are still forced to play as a generic dumb faced average guy. That seems to be sort of tradition by now.
The last "good" character was in MW:3 .. along with the best story (in my opinion) .. story, mind .. not gameplay.
Graphics have changed, UI and general design. Everything looks cleaner (which makes sense), but also cluttered (does not make sense for the Clans). Mechs run smoother, react quicker and more direct. I would still adhere to the classic controls rather than pseudo 1st person shooter controls, but to each one their own.
Weapons and sound design are very odd. They do not work for me. Explosions are much more opaque, obscuring gameplay, weapons have a LOT less weight/impact .. and are canonically wrong i think. (PPCs should be particle beams of sorts .. or according to the lore .. lightning bolts of sorts) .. in the new iteration they are blue balls of light? Kind of goes full circle to MW:2 .. when the engine was not able to render beams/lines.
The sound of steps, impacts and all is much, MUCH lighter .. mechs do not feel heavy anymore.
On the positive side .. buildings dont just collapse by looking at them like the basegame and the environment is much nicer done, thanks to a more or less hand crafted area (i say more or less, because evidently, only key elevations and points of interest are .. while much of the filler is generated)
The UI is needlessly overhauled .. and feels like a step back from the basegame .. mostly because mods have allowed a much greater detail and customization.
My conclusion .. what does it feel like? .. ahh .. yes! .. like a console game! with all the negatives of only having a controller attached to it. Gone is the detailed customization, gone the mods .. and gone is the meticulous rebalancing.
but hello, to nicer graphics, smoother optimization and a much, much nicer single player experience.
Once done with the campaign .. its back to MW:5 with mods though.
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PC
The faces, the voice acting doesn't bother me but I'm 5 hours in right now and what is bothering me is I only get about 20 frames, sometimes dropping to 10 on a system that should run this game fine - Ryzen 5 5600G / 6600XT 8GB / 32GB and I run this game on the lowest setting across the board, on 2K resolution and this game just runs like a snail in a race.
I also don't like the lack of mechs, I know there's 16 and they're omnimechs but it just doesn't sit right with me - maybe I got spoiled with MechWarriors 5 Mercenaries.
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PC
Technical it's ****'s barely moved in from five years ago. The game however is dreadful. The story is lamentable, the characters unsympathetic, the voice acting terrible. Galaxy Commander Perez in particular seems to have been ordered to emphasize EVERY WORD. Like some internet troll typing in nothing but ****'s wearing.
Mission design is terrible. Go here, destroy everything you can see, and here's more enemies for you to kill.MORE is better, so have some more.
The problemis your mech suffers gradual erosion so you can lose the game against the MORE enemies 30 minutes away if you have bad luck. And there's no in mission ****'sa tedious trudge through samey, easy enemies till the gradual erosion catches up with you while the grumpy geezer yells how useless you are while despatching enemies at a rate of 20 to 1.
How about stopping those giant space ships dropping enemies off rather than screaming down my ear hole?
The protagonists here are explicitly racist, constantly harping on about their superiority while The Asian opponents are derided as ****'s nasty and makes the people im supposed to be rooting for unsympathetic and unpleasant.
Add in a shed load of busy work, a confusing mech editor and multiple in game currencies and they've thrown out many good elements from mercenaries with drudgery.
Avoid. Unless you have game pass.
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PC
(MW5 Clans review, as of Game Patch N.1)
My Specs:
EVGA FTW 3 RTX 3060ti overclocked,
3700x Ryzen 7 CPU,
32GB 3600Mhz DDR4,
M.2 1TB SSD (Game Drive),
The system requirements shown on store pages are not accurate at all. The game does not run at 60 fps regardless of graphics settings and resolution selected with latest Nvidia drivers. I have to lock the game at 30 fps in Nvidia control panel to get a somewhat decent frame pacing presentation, but the game still drops below 30fps to 10fps or less in almost every mission for minutes. I am in shock PGI, you guys have had 5 years since MW5 mercs launch along with the most powerful engine in the gaming industry (Unreal Engine 5) and this is the result really you guys? The mechlab is complete garbage due to the most restricted feature set of mech customization in mechwarrior/battletech history. The lack of mechs to play is also completely unacceptable regardless of the lore/timeline in game. The game is fun at times but not even close to what Mw5 Mercs offers, its just barely fun. Even after the Day one patch the game still hasnt improved in any sizeable way, fps drops like a rock in the sea and is still to volatile to get 30-60fps regardless of graphics settings and resolution selected as stated above. Plus the most annoying bug still persists when the game is started or restarted, the game resets all key bind controls to default settings even after setting gameusersettings to read only. The Game straight up loads all other settings within the INI except for my damn key binds! I have redone my keybinds over 20 times in the last 24+ hours since game launch. THIS IS COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE PGI! and the saddest fact is mw5 Mercs feels more advanced than clans in everyway aside from graphics and the writing of the campaign, which is not a good look for the future of Mechwarrior games. I give a 3/10 review for mw5 clans, it should be a 9/10 or 10/10 easily. But with the issues stated above its not worthy of anything above 3/10, and that's me being very generous to be completely honest. I have never in my history of playing Mechwarrior games have had this much frustration due to "creative" and poor optimization decisions made by PGI. I really want this game to be fantastic, but the indisputable fact is the game needed way more time to cook and better creative decisions. This game is yet another example of a half baked bug ridden Mess that could have been avoided if the devs wouldn't have lost the identity of mechwarrior to stupid creative decisions while simultaneously jumping the gun on the game's release. Its a real damn shame this is the latest and new standard for Mechwarrior games.
Below i have compiled a list of all the previous Mechwarrior games that have more playble mechs than MW5 Clans from the last 29 years.
(1995)Mechwarrior 2 31st century had 19 playable mechs (1999)Mechwarrior 3 had 18 playable mechs
(2000)Mechwarrior 4 vengeance had 26 playable mechs
(2002)Mechwarrior 4 Mercs had over 40 playable mechs
(2019)Mechwarrior 5 Mercs(not including DLC) had 50 playable mechs
(2024)Mechwarrior 5 Clans has only 16 playable
TLDR: MW5 Clans has a great campaign story and pretty graphics but generally is heavily lacking in every other way, as a result MW5 Clans is easily usurped by almost all of its predecessors. MW5 Clans is the first mechwarrior game since 1995 to have less than 18 playble mechs! The result of 29+ years of alleged MechWarrior "Enovation"
*MechWarrior Veteran begins to cry profusely* What happened to my boy!!!!
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PC
Summary In MECHWARRIOR 5: CLANS, players take on the role of a newly graduated pilot from the Smoke Jaguar cadet program, thrust into the heart of the Clan Invasion of the Inner Sphere during Operation Revival. This pivotal moment in the MechWarrior universe sees players leading a five-mech "Star" squad across numerous planets with diverse biome...
Platforms:
- PlayStation 5
- PC
- Xbox Series X
Initial Release Date: Oct 16, 2024
Developer:
- Piranha Games
Publisher: Piranha Games
Genres: