MechWarrior 5: Clans Steam Charts & Stats

I'm getting too old to really enjoy games w/ corporate mission structure, esp MW titles that involve random vtol's and tanks that walk out to die for no explicable reason

Having beaten the campaign, I first want to say that I absolutely love the gameplay. The big, heavy, clunky mechs are awesome, and first-person view feels really nice. There's some good possibilities with tactics based on your loadout, and mech preferences. Unfortunately, as with any Mechwarrior game I've played, you kind of -have- to eventually move in the direction of the biggest, heaviest mech you can get your hands on, or you'll get completely destroyed at later missions. Also, your allies are morons. Definitely turn friendly-fire off. And it's frustrating getting to make custom loadouts that suit my playstyle just right, only to be told that for any of the training missions to upgrade my pilots, I have to use default loadouts to get the full reward. Now as to the story... initially, I hated it. The characters are very wooden, and bland, and seem to lack much depth or critical thinking. Instead of meaningful interactions, they blather on and on for hours about political and tactical maneuvering, pseudo-religious dogma, and posturing about how great they are while looking down on all the people from the inner sphere, all while being blatant hypocrites the whole time. The most interesting character in the game is the guy whose only noteworthy character traits are that he uses contractions, hates his name, and is a hacker in a system where everything is infiltrated by scanning and holding down a button. Eventually the story does get better... the characters start to develop some personal goals and motivations, they get conflicted about things, at least one dude with compensation issues descends into full-blown insanity, and you even get to make a singular choice in the game. A lot of it is still pretty predictable, but it's somewhat interesting. I hear the DLC is better in regards to the story, but admittedly I'm a bit conflicted about getting it, considering I spent the entire game having mechs cluttering up the market that I can't buy without purchasing the DLC. Maybe I'll get it if I see a really good sale. Lastly, this game has a lot of glaring technical problems. It hogs resources and will crash your system if you don't limit the framerate manually, and has had that problem since launch. And that part where you get to make a choice that I mentioned? Apparently I made the wrong choice, and got completely locked out of completing one of the training objectives, because the spot on the map where it's supposed to be for that story path doesn't actually have the objective. This is also a known problem from at least 7 months ago, according to posts I found about it. Anyways, while I enjoyed this game enough to complete it, I can't really recommend it. The story was just a painful slog, and there's enough frustrations that I'd feel genuinely bad recommending it to any of my friends. I mostly played through it so I could get to the slow, clunky, gritty, customizable mechs, and awesome battles with them, because I love those things. I guess if there was either a better, more immersive story with a protagonist that had more character than raw tofu, or just more focus on the mech building and battling, and less on the lip-flapping, I'd be happy.

A game I want to love, but poor mission pacing, and non stop crashes makes this game more frustrating then fun. I highly encourage PGI to go play older iterations of mech warrior, throwing a half regiment at a clan star every mission is not only laborious for the player, it also does a poor job of sticking to any kind of lore. Ill revise this review once they patch the game and i can actually play past the 8th or so mission that refuses to play without crashing.

This game gives you puzzles to solve with unit composition and tactics but doesn't give you the command controls to control your squad properly. For example if you are on a mission where you are trying to run away from heavy stuff and have to punch a hole quickly through other units to get away from them, using the follow me command forces your squad into column formation (like a duck and her ducklings). Half the mechs in your squad can't shoot because the others are blocking them and when they do shoot they end up friendly firing you. This could be fixed with a simple formation command. Friendly units constantly move off the points you command them to, walk in front of your shots and bug out in weird ways. For a game that is constantly telling you to use unit tactics its quite painful to do so. I find to get anything done I have to constantly pause the game and command units in the overhead mode. I dont mind the concept of a tactics game like that but at that point why would I play this over a Battletech game then?

The progression system in this one is super grindy. The weapon balance is very bad (lasers dominate ballistics/missiles). The UI in the mech lab is near worthless and you have to commit changes before you can see how the numbers change. Story is good, the game looks amazing but feels like a huge step down from Mercs.

Great story, chance to play Clans and more polished than Mechwarrior 5 Mercerneries. However Mercerneries has a better replayability due to its open world availablilty.

The gameplay is a bit too shoot-em up, but still fun. The story was surprisingly good, and I was surprised at how well it brought the rich lore of the universe accross.

I quite like this game with very good cut scenes and a straightforward story mode. I don't actually want to talk to every single one for the side quests nor walk around pointlessly. just straight to the point mech fighting and good cut scenes.

Very good. But why is the Ebon Jaguar/Cauldron Borne the iconic mech of Smoke Jaguar locked behind the Ghost Bear DLC? Well hopefully the next DLC is Clan Wolf and has the Timber Wolf Mk.II Suffers from the same thing every MechWarrior game suffers from. That is, as you near the end game your lance pretty much HAS to be all assault class to do them. Which sucks because I like heavy class the most, and no assault mechs do scouting, flanking, or tech support (ECM, Narc, Beagle). It's slow as balls assaults or you will lose. [spoiler] Which is probably why they kill off your tech support character and replace him with a combat focused character. [/spoiler]

The campaign is short. Just when you finally get to use the big toys, the game is over. There is no career mode, no sandbox mode, none of the things that added replay value to MW5 Mercenaries. Then I bought the DLC and it was just another extremely short campaign. There's nothing here worth the price of admission.