MechWarrior 5: Clans

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.

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.

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.

Coop-oriented garbage very bad gameplay if you care about a solid single player experience. Useless AI companions that don't know how to shoot straight and even shoot your own mech. Unfortunatly you need to play it coop with other humans playing as friendly mechs or else you are going have a hard time enjoying this as a Solo experience with AI companions. All missions are balanced for using squads and since the AI in this game is very stupid you are going to face hell of time playing this Solo

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.