fmano MechWarrior 5: Clans Review

Re gameplay When I read one reviewer said that missions tend to get repetitive because of the way waves of enemy get keep thrown at you, I thought it was some kind of mission type, just like what you had with MW5: Mercs. But this was the status quo for most missions. The game is set up in such a way that you tend to have to play with heavier mechs or just lose out on attrition, because you can't survive the waves of enemy. I realised this after playing about 50 hours in; I hoped the missions would change, but it just kept on following the same old tired script of spawning _yet_ another enemy lance. I surprised myself when I said out loud "really, now?" It's quite unbelieveable how uncreative the mission design are in this game. This is probably my biggest problem with the game. (I was a bit disappointed with the mech lab, but mostly because it seemed so pared down; it didn't even have a lore/about button about each mech.) Re story However, 'story' is touted to be the game's strengths. But it has its own peculiarities. Big chunks of narrative dialogue are being spoken during missions, even during firefights. These may be distracting, and they may sound dumb at times, but the greatest woe is that there are tonnes of it. If you have to, heaven forbid, repeat a mission, you will hear the same dialogue over and over again. You can't skip it; but you may set the Voice Volume to 10% like I did and so mitigate the vexation of all the contrived drama coming out from the mouths of preadolescent Mechwarriors. The aspect of the 'story' I dislike is the characters arcs, because they're cardboard characters trying to pretend they're not. I'd rather have cardboard characters do cardboard things than listen to melodrama. It's badly written, and I wish they skipped it. The parts of the story that I liked was more to do with 'living' the lore, like participating in war crimes (Edo), or choosing Warden or Crusader at some later point, and to participate in large battles. Vs MW5: Mercs I had to compare it with Mercs. When I stopped playing Clans (I will finish it sometime soon), I re-installed MW5: Mercs to give me context. And I was struck by 2 things: Mercs's sound design was actually more integrated and convincing (although sometimes not spatially correct), and the mechs felt more realistic, i.e. heaviness. It's no surprise, hwoever, that what I like about my replay of Mercs are all the things I dislike about Clans. First, whilst the missions are categorised into types, and they can get repetitive (by nature they do repeat), the missions themselves don't have a repetitive component to them. Also, lighter mechs may play a relevant role in some mission types, unlike in Clans, where only heavies/assault matter. Second, Mercs's story is told old-fashioned: bit-by-bit, via News, via contracts, talking to the people, etc. You get a sense of something happening because of all those elements, not because you watched a cinematic. Best of all, there are no hysterics or whiny dramatics. The good bits Graphics and effects. It's certainly an improvement from Mercs. People complain about fps issues, but the only ones I could observe are mechs walking with stop motion animation, but camera framerate seems steady. It's not janky in that sense. YMMV, of course.