MechWarrior 5: Clans Carves a Strangely Satisfying Home from ’90s Space War Wreckage
A sluggish late game and mediocre meta layer can’t kill the ‘90s Space War vibes that Piranha Games brings to bear in their latest single-player campaign of big murderous mechs.
On July 8, 2784, Commanding General of the Star League Aleksandr Sergeyevich Kerensky issued a single-word order: “Exodus.” Within five months of that broadcast, over two-thirds of the Star League Defense Force left the solar system and traveled deep to a largely uncharted space and an entirely uncertain future. After 60 years of brutal warfare and even worse treachery among the Inner Sphere houses that comprised the dying Star League, Kerensky had had enough. He saw the collapse coming. He was there when the fatal blow was delivered. And in a bid to save the Star League and a homeworld he loved, he and his followers left so that they, maybe one day, could return to rescue the Inner Sphere from the devastation of its own endless cycles of selfishness and conflict. It might have even worked.
When his son, Nicholas, was rejected by the high ranking SLDF officers upon Aleksandr’s death, a schism formed. A second exodus. This time the son would exile himself and his followers to an even more remote sector. Some 20 years after his father’s exodus from the Inner Sphere, Nicholas Kerensky, seeing a purer version of his father’s vision, founded the original 20 Clans.
Through fascism and social engineering, falsified histories, breeding and indoctrination programs, and constant brutal battles, the Clans were forged. They aren’t Inner Sphere people. They aren’t even the remnants of the original SLDF who fled with Aleksandr. They are better. They have eugenics. They have been selectively breeding and running societies like Darwinian bootcamps on fast-forward. They have the blood of Kerensky. They have honor and singularity of purpose. They have their own goofy battle language composed of portmanteaus. And they do not have fucking contractions.
While the houses of the Inner Sphere were busy cobbling together weaponized HitchBots and fantasizing about assassinating their own mothers, the Clans were out here building the hardest motherfucking BattleMechs in the entire universe. And now, in 3050, they are ready to come home.
MechWarrior 5: Clans isn’t the first time the nightmare whirlwind of vat-grown cultist fanatics in three-story tall death machines leapt from the hex grids of FASA’s tabletop games of 31st century mechanized warfare into a videogame. That distinction belongs to Activision’s MechWarrior 2 all the way back in 1995.
This is, however (as far as I can find or remember—it’s been a long 30 years in this universe for me, okay?), the first time the Clan Invasion has been so painstakingly represented in a videogame. And I think the reason no one has done it before is because it’s a big fucking task.
But after creating MechWarrior: Online, a successful MMO that’s lasted for over a decade, Piranha Games might be uniquely suited to the task. As stewards of the BattleTech brand, for at least as long as the inconstant and greedy eye of Microsoft allows, Piranha Games knows all the lingo, the lore, the specifications. They’ve pulled up FASA 8614—Technical Readout: 3050 and FASA 1645 —Invading Clans and are more than happy to fill every hardpoint and empty ton with specific detail ripped right from the holiest of splatbooks.
This begins to strain when you get your first taste of the narrative. Taking the role of (after what feels like the sveltest tutorial in modern gaming) Star Commander Jayden, you and the last remaining members of your sibko (the closest thing to family Clan members have) are bombarded with more Clan Speak and a rapid-fire sequence of cutscenes that set the Clan Invasion of 3050 in motion.
Then it’s six hours on a dustbowl Periphery world fighting fucking Spheroid pirates in light mechs that vastly outclass their centuries old Succession Wars relics. When comms chatter happens during missions, you’ll hear about this constantly. You’ve never known Inner Sphere people, after all. You’re the distant, distant, distant blood of Kerensky. You don’t know them, and you’ll quickly realize they really don’t know you. But you need planetary resources and a pathway from Clan Space to the Inner Sphere, so they have to die. This is the Clan way.
Ask yourself, how many times can you hear a loudly bleated “Aff!” instead of “Yes” or even “Affirmative” or any other word that denotes confirmation, before wanting to shoot a volley of 20 long range missiles into the back of your best (and genetically-related) friend? How many times will you put up with Star Commander Jayden (his name really is Jayden, it’s incredible) co-signing some truly wild fascist nonsense before you snap and wish you could embody anybody else in the BattleTech universe? The answer might surprise you.
About 20 minutes in I hated it when anyone in my Sibko opened their mouth.
In my earliest mission on the Periphery Pirate Planet called Santander, I watched as Liam—the elite hacker of our group (this is important for later)—parked his BattleMech. I mean full-stop parked his brand new Kit Fox OmniMech in the middle of an open plane, and in full view of a Rifleman’s two Large Lasers and AC/5s on the mesa above him.
“Right arm critical.”
“Right arm destroyed.”
“Left arm critical.”
I looked to see if he was even returning fire. No, he was trying to gun down a light tank. That was his targeting priority.
“I lost a component.”
“Left arm destroyed.”
He didn’t even last five minutes. By the time I found the Rifleman and took it out, Liam was down to just legs. I’ll never understand what he thought he was accomplishing. Out of a thousand others in our sibko, he was one of five survivors. He has an impressive genetic heritage. It’s the damnedest thing. At the end of the battle, saKhan Sarah Weaver chewed him out for using contractions. That Liam. Oh, that Liam.
I won’t say the members of my Star got any better under my command, but at least they were more likely to remove limbs from other mechs rather than have their own removed. But that’s mostly because I started putting them in bigger and bigger mechs.
If there’s one big flaw with MechWarrior 5: Clans, it’s the Tonnage Issue. Something that Piranha isn’t alone in, but was particularly frustrating here.
Whatever you call it: Army Points, Battle Value, Challenge Rating, the method by which encounters are balanced and combat expectations are measured has an inflation problem in a lot of games. In BattleTech, big mechs hold more weapons, bigger weapons, better weapons. They’re more expensive. They come later in a player’s career, so naturally they’re seen as “better.”
When Simon Belmont upgrades his whip, he never looks back. If Mario could cram his cavernous nostrils full of stardust full-time, he sure fucking would. It’s only natural to hold on to the new more powerful thing, and for gamers, progression is often seen as getting the new more powerful thing.
The problem is while the destructive and protective capacity of mechs in BattleTech may scale with weight class, that’s not all there is to piloting a big metal boy. When you’re building a wall around a military installation, or trying to convince a large orbital dropship to kindly spin-down its fusion reactor and surrender: well, sure. You want the biggest weapons and the thickest armor you can cram onto an Endo Steel skeleton. But for recon, scouting, escort missions, all the variety of mission types that exist in the BattleTech universe? Sometimes you want those other types not to go to waste.
But, as Clans does, when each mission signals that deploying 200 tons underweight is going to be a death sentence, it will be. Trust me, I’ve tried (even on Story Mode). You’re left with no choice. Unlock bigger mechs. Use the bigger mechs. And watch the mission go from 20 minutes to 40 minutes because that Warhawk has a top speed of 64 km/h, and that’s your fastest guy now.
I wanted to use the Mech I had fallen in love with, had Jayden take an affinity slot in. I named it, customized it, and halfway through the game, it was completely impractical. Even scouting missions had become 450-500 ton battles. I wanted to spend more time investing in my MechWarriors and less time buying new Mechs. I hated saying so long to my Nova, because I had so much damn fun piloting it.
In its primary configuration, the Nova is capable of producing more than double the heat it can dissipate. With 14 internally-housed double heatsinks and an additional four pod-mounted ones, the Nova is a prime example of the specific engineering of Clan engineering. Eschewing missiles and ballistic weapons entirely, the Nova mounts 12 ER Medium Lasers in each fist. More than enough to core all but the heaviest of Inner Sphere BattleMechs. 10 of its 50 tons are plate armor, providing Nova pilots with the security of safety in the thickest of melees, while still being agile enough to quickly navigate dense urban layouts for planetary assaults. With enough skill, luck, and daring, any Clan Mechwarrior piloting a Nova can stand toe to toe with even the heaviest mechs of the Inner Sphere.
I recite Tokasha MechWorks spoofs of David Ogilvy’s Rolls-Royce ad copy to myself as I hide behind a Draconis Combine office park complex in the Studio Ghibli hillside of Turtle Bay. There’s a very big boy walking up the street, and I’m all that’s left. Mia, Naomi, Liam, and Ezra? Well, they should be dead, but lucky for them, they’re narratively important. Still, they can’t help me now. Their mechs have been chewed to shit and even I’m on my last legs. I can hear the big boy on the other side of the complex now. He’s turning around the corner to find me. “Fuck it. YOLO.” A classic Smoke Jaguar battlecry. And that’s when I floor it. When 50 tons of Clan OmniMech hits concrete walls at 86 km/h not much is left. Big boy doesn’t even have time to turn his heavy frame around. I blow way past every one of my heat sinks with a three-second burst of Clan-spec Medium Laser (sincerely so much better than Spheroid lasers) right into his barely armored back. Emergency heat procedures kick in. My weapons shut down. But it’s okay. I cored that fucker in his silly little samurai robot. There are no more contacts on the radar. Time to take these wrecks back to the mechbay to let the engineering caste do what they can before the next drop.
It’s in moments like these that MechWarrior 5: Clans produces something that’s impossible to engineer, but just shy of magic. Just like the time I blew both arms off of a Quickdraw with dual Gauss cannons before he could even get a shot off, or when Ezra popped two big bursts of ionizing radiation into the head of a Phoenix Hawk while it was mid-fight and we just watched it fall straight down into a river. My time in Piranha’s MechWarrior was one of frustration, but also it’s not without a degree of magic.
There’s things I want from MechWarrior 5: Clans. But aside from being willing to force players into low/moderate tonnage missions (in addition to the heavy weights) throughout the campaign, none of them really change the core experience. Piranha gave me the Clan Invasion battles I’d let flounder on my mom’s expensive dining room tables for the first time in my videogaming history. If you know the story, you know. And if you don’t, it’s grim.
To know the metanarrative of the BattleTech universe is to know a history of disappointment and disintegration. The Jackie O. by-way-of Princess Diana, Melissa Steiner, is going to get assassinated by her conspiratorial and jealous daughter who will form the Lyrian Alliance only to be killed by her own son she made mixing her DNA with her brother’s. The Draconis Combine is always going to be a racist disaster of batshit ‘80s orientalist eroticized panic over Japan. The Kuritans will make bad decisions. The Smoke Jaguars will make worse. Terra is a beautiful lie and the Star League a dead fantasy. No one is happy and everything hurts in the BattleTech universe. That’s Space War. I won’t spoil the final arc of the campaign, but there are few decisions you can make in 3050 that don’t destroy lives or end friendships—and it’s those interpersonal choices that have galactic consequences. If there’s one narrative success in MechWarrior 5: Clans, it’s understanding that.
Piranha has brought the vibes of the tragically abandoned Space Above & Beyond, combined it with the narrow mission focus and weirdo NPCs who court death of Wing Commander, and the late game, long range slug-fest of a grognard submarine simulator. I know plenty of people who are currently champing at the bit to give Piranha their money just from that description alone.
At first, I was highly resistant. After all, in my heart, I’m not only a die-hard Nova/Jenner girl. I’m also Armored Core people. I can appreciate assault class mechs, but I never want to have to pilot one. Not even Clan Ghost Bear’s sick-as-hell Kodiak. The constant tonnage inflation. Missions that really were just “go to a grid reference, kill what pops out” no matter if they were Recon, Defense, or Assaults. Maps that punished me for trying to maneuver out of bounds to give my Star some space to outflank those Ryugawa nerds. The mission where I was stuck in an 95-ton Executioner, because I needed the firepower and armor, but I also had to chase down two stolen light Clan mechs, and it reminded me of running the mile as a fat child with allergy-induced asthma well behind my gazelle-like Hitler Youth classmates in the 7th grade. Look, I never claimed to be the strongest candidate in my sibko.
The more I sit with my feelings about Clans, the more I think Piranha is on to something. Perhaps this actually is what BattleTech always wants to be. Somewhere between a bad live action TV show and a bad children’s cartoon about war crimes is the fundamental joy of stomping around inside of big robots that tear through buildings like tissue paper and no one can be right, because everyone is wrong. I wish they’d honestly leaned more into the strengths of this game. The absurd vibes of BattleTech. Because when Clans actually does that, Piranha reminds me exactly of why BattleTech is so fucking cool.
MechWarrior 5: Clans was developed and published by Piranha Games. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Dia Lacina is a queer indigenous writer and photographer. She tweets too much at @dialacina.
