Early last week gaming outlets all over published their reviews of MechWarrior 5: Clans, and while Polygon was not among them, it’s not for lack of trying. Over the last few months I’ve run up against some hardware difficulties thanks to my bruised and battered gaming laptop. Not unexpected, mind you, but deeply inconvenient when working to a deadline. But this is how the sausage gets made on this side of the internet, and these things happen.
For that reason, I’ve withheld my most pointed criticisms of the game since its launch. For instance, I’m unable to determine if the horrifying movement of the character’s lips and teeth as they chew on their lines of dialogue is a me problem or a developer problem. Same for the screen tearing, low frame rate, and general poor performance of the game on my personal device prior to launch. As it stands now, things are going much better for me — although the cinematics will often lag well behind the audio in cutscenes. But gameplay-wise, it seems like the day-one patch shored up the most glaring issues I’d had with the client.
And yet one part still feels off to me, nearly as off as it was the first time I mentioned it way back in 2020 with the launch of MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries… and again with its DLC. Specifically, the game’s AI MechWarriors are really bad at being MechWarriors.
In my experience, the allied AI — meaning the other members of your Clan Star of five that you fight alongside from the beginning of the game — are pretty much useless when the virtual shit hits the fan. I have grown sick and tired of seeing them wander into my line of fire, only to get hosed with a stray shot from a gauss rifle. On occasion, the AI character who drives my missile boat will run screaming into close combat with a flamethrower before firing off a single long-range salvo. When things really kick off it looks more like a group of heavily armed children playing post-apocalyptic soccer than a post-human cadre of genetically engineered super soldiers. They just keep ejecting from their heavily damaged mechs, escaping into orbit while dooming me to run the same missions again and again. There isn’t even a way to save your progress mid-mission, which leaves brute-force save-scumming fully off the table.
Thus, even on the game’s lowest difficulty setting, I still find myself restarting and running missions two, three, four times or more before walking away aggravated. So last week I dialed up a few friends, set them to downloading the game for free via their Xbox Game Pass subscriptions, and stepped off with a team of three actual humans to take on the game’s “normal” difficulty setting.
What followed was an hour of absolutely stunning action
What followed was an hour of absolutely stunning action. We trounced the enemy, crushed all resistance before us, and looked good doing it. More importantly, though, I found that the game began to tell a much more rewarding, action-packed story — one that I could finally take time to enjoy.
Up until that point in MechWarrior 5: Clans, nearly all of my time had been spent micromanaging my AI teammates, hammering the fire-at-my-enemy button and hoping for the best. That’s because the game’s tactical command system is extremely limited. The game doesn’t give you a way to change your ally’s tactical posture between offense or defense, for instance. Neither does it allow you to dictate which weapons they’ll use to engage the enemy in a given situation, or at which ranges they’ll use them — a key feature of both BattleTech and MechWarrior since its birth on the tabletop in the 1980s. Instead, players are left with just a limited set of options: You can tell your allies where to stand, and you can tell them to shoot or not shoot your target. That’s pretty much it.
But last night was different. From inside her direct-fire mech, Polygon’s Alice Jovanée was able to land shots with pinpoint accuracy. When we needed her to disable the most devastating enemy weapons at range, she did so expertly. Then, once her own primary weapon system was disabled by enemy fire, she was able to change her tactics on the fly by swinging in close with a devastating battery of ballistic machine guns. Meanwhile, myself and another friend laid into the enemy’s legs — all while avoiding hitting Alice with friendly fire thanks to careful communication.
Image: Piranha Games
Later, after my own primary weapon went offline, that same friend was able to come to my aid in melee, leveling an enemy mech with a shoulder slam like a 40-ton linebacker.
The game didn’t just become easier, it became more cinematic as well. Without the idiotic scrum of childlike AI clogging up the foreground, I was finally able to see the well-crafted terrain in the background. Freed from the moment-to-moment terror of watching my team get chewed to pieces, I was able to observe the tactics that the enemy AI was using to prosecute the fight. Given some breathing room, I was finally able to appreciate how grand the scope and scale of MechWarrior 5: Clans truly is. It’s leaps and bounds better than MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries.
Yet this is not a perfect multiplayer game — not by a long shot. There’s no integrated voice chat, for one, so you’re on your own for that. You’ll need to use a Nintendo Switch-style friend code for cross-platform play. Also, only the host is able to move the storyline forward for their own copy of the game. Everyone else is just along for the ride.
But I assure you, that ride will be much more enjoyable with a couple of humans on your side. Whether or not that hefty caveat is worth the asking price of $49.99 is up to you, but if you’ve got a subscription to Xbox Game Pass, then here is a multiplayer experience that you should not miss.
MechWarrior 5: Clans was released Oct. 16 on PC, as well as for Xbox and PlayStation consoles. The game was previewed on Windows PC using a pre-release download code provided by Piranha Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.