I'll be approaching this review from the vantage point of someone that started his Battletech voyage with the Mechwarrior 2 demo. In other words, I'm OLD. I'm old and I replay old games so my reference points to the MW2, MW3, and MW4 games are relatively fresh. I also play a fair bit of old fashioned Classic Battletech when I'm not painting for Camo Specs Online, and this is important because every Mechwarrior game must wrestle with a basic problem inherited from the table top game. More on that later. I'll be avoiding direct spoilers but some general discussion of the plot and characters is necessary. I played most of the game on Expert, but did drop one endgame mission all the way down to Story Mode
Mechwarrior 5: Clans has been a highly anticipated release, at least in my micro-niche of online Battletech/Mechwarrior enthusiasts. We haven't had a video game from the Clan perspective since Ghost Bear's Legacy in 1995. That was almost THIRTY YEARS AGO. There's some logic in that, putting the player at the helm of a Mercenary company instead of a Clan or house means having a much wider roster of possible enemies to choose from. No surprise we've had three Mercenary based games since our last Clan title.
The developers of MW5Clans announced their intentions to craft a serious single player experience from the outset. This was going to be a big departure from the procedurally generated sandbox of MW5 Mercenaries, utilizing lessons the team had learned from crafting DLC for that game. I would say Mechwarrior 2's legendary cutscenes were clearly a big inspiration for how they chose to deliver the narrative to the player. It's a carefully crafted cinematic experience delivering pivotal moments from the Clan Invasion story as fullscreen clips that someone will no doubt piece into a game movie soon enough. Character moments involving your starmates and big plot developments are all delivered in these cutscenes, and you can replay them at any time. Clearly a LOT of time was allocated to developing the character models and ships for these sequences. Robocop: Rogue City was a well received game at the same price point from a smaller developer last year, also running on the Unreal 5 engine, and its cheap character models look positively garish compared to the polished realism of virtually everyone in MW5Clans.
A game is more than a few cutscenes though and frankly Mechwarrior titles have always done an admirable job in this department, so how's the gameplay?
If you spent a lot of time in Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries and its DLCs, there's nothing about the basic game loop that will be terribly surprising. Mechwarrior games have to contend with being based on a system originally designed for a 1:1 match between 8-10 'mechs. In a simulator that doesn't give you anywhere close to enough enemies for a mission length beyond a handful of minutes, so every Mechwarrior title has either revised the weapon damages, included a repair facility of some sort, or both. Mechwarrior 5 leans into a formula first seen in MW4, choosing to tweak the weapon damages and include repair bays. Compared to MW5 Mercs, the repair bays are virtually omnipresent and I'm not sure I'd call myself a fan of this approach. Rather than being a necessary feature to counterbalance the relatively high damage weapons, these bays feel like they're artificially extending the mission length beyond what it should be. For me personally, mission length was one of my two biggest problems with MW5 Clans. They're absolutely on the long end for any Mechwarrior title and often drag on AFTER they should, particularly in the end game. Resolving a major plot point, seeing the pivotal cutscene, and then getting forced back into the action to fight through another dozen 'mechs feels like being chained to your theater seat after the movie is over and the lights are coming back on.
Basic techniques from MW5 Clans carry directly over to this game. I always preferred to headshot enemies with ER-PPCs and gauss rifles, a tactic that's perfectly valid here as well. You do have a grand total of FOUR friendly 'mechs in your star, which can be a real headache when you're trying to navigate canyons and any somewhat confined area. I found myself taking a much more methodical approach with this game, going slow and trying to bring all our guns to bear on individual targets. The command system for your starmates is much more detailed than MW5 Mercs, but I frankly didn't use it for much of anything beyond ordering them to focus down single targets with all their combined firepower. The game doesn't pause while you're issuing commands. That's a problem, because every second spent ordering a starmate is a second you didn't spend blasting an enemy Atlas in the head with your PPCs. For the first time I can remember in any Mechwarrior title, we get honest to God BOSS FIGHTS. Challenging battles against massive enemy units with small weak points you must consistently target. It adds a very different vibe to the game, making it feel a lot more like a traditional FPS. I generally like the approach, but the late game returns to the usual "Kill the enemy commander" trope that's been a Mechwarrior staple since MW2.
Where the game gets messy is the upgrade/levelling system. If you're a hardcore Mechwarrior player that sank way too many hours into MW5 Mercs, you'll have a very good idea of what you need to do, but even a grizzled veteran like myself can easily miss crucial upgrade mechanics due to their sheer multiplicity. The roster in this game is very limited compared to previous titles, a necessary concession given the project constraints (Elementals were another ambition cut at least temporarily short) and consequently, your loadouts are going to be limited to a few specific builds. On my playthough, I didn't know how to unlock the alternate omni-mech configs for a few hours and this absolutely hurt my progress on Expert mode. As any Battletech player can tell you, Clan 40-45 ton 'mechs are not the most amazing and you'll be stuck in them for quite a while.
You gotta open up those alternate loadouts to find something with the hardpoints for more lethal firepower. 
As usual, the Evasion ability on your character profiles is going to be clutch for reducing incoming damage, plus you'll want to be researching armor upgrades at the science station along with anything else pertinent to your preferred builds/weapons. I dumped everything into Evasion, armor, and ER-PPC damage/heat reduction/cycle time. As I said initially, these systems are kind of a mess. Your characters gain XP and leveling them is fairly simple (there's a preferred chassis perk slot that requires some future oriented planning), but then your 'mechs ALSO gain XP and you can spend that XP to unlock alternate configurations or to improve the acceleration/top speed/handling of the 'mechs. Did I mention there's also a science station that has its own currency you'll be spending to research other blanket upgrades for your whole team? Oh, and you can upgrade that science station by spending resources. Suffice it to say, the post mission time is gonna eat up a lot of your playthrough experience in Clans. You'll be trying to unlock new upgrades, keep your 'mechs repaired, buy new 'mechs, unlock their alternate configs, level your characters, tweak your loadouts, and just generally toil away at various spreadsheet related tasks.
All that being said, generally I think players prefer overly dense RPG mechanics to systems that are too stripped down. If you're gonna fall on one side of that divide, it's likely better to give the player too much choice than not enough.
Narrative and story-wise Clans does what it set out to do. There was really only one story you could ever tell about being a Star Commander in Clan Smoke Jaguar during the Invasion, and this game goes right on about setting up the obvious personal conflict for the player character. The player is basically immersed in the role of a fresh and idealistic cadet with an equally green star of fellow sibko compatriots. Mechwarrior Liam is the entry point for new visitors to the Battletech universe, which necessarily makes him a bit contrived and potentially objectionable to longtime fans. I didn't care much for him initially but he did grow on me a bit over time, particularly when delivering exposition about Comstar. Ezra is basically the heart and conscience for the player, representing a decidedly Warden perspective, while Mia is the opposite pole, providing the sort of aggressive Crusader archetype we'd associate with more than one Jade Falcon character. Naomi is pretty much there to provide a reality check on the star's idealism, a reminder that the Smoke Jaguar leadership is far, far from perfect.
Out of all of them, Mechwarrior Alexander Hoyt surprised me the most with a particularly memorable cutscene on a warrior's duty to his clan.
Overall the tone of characters and their dialogue might be threaded with too many Young Adult vibes for some players, but honestly this is consistent with the writing in Battletech novels more generally. (See for example the Ranna/Phelan love affair in Lethal Heritage) I've never been much a fan of this aspect of Battletech, but it's not at all inconsistent with the setting. Cordera Perez has some great cutscenes (not all the line delivery really worked for me) and he's written to repeatedly say things that underline his hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness. Emilie Wimmer is a believable Star Captain that's more competent than Perez but also just as cold-hearted as the rest of the Jaguar leadership. The rest of the top brass is exactly what you'd expect if you've read the novels and sourcebooks.
If I had a critique here, it's that while the player is given a narrative choice, a fork in the road before the end game, there was more that
could've been done. This is a game that loves RPG systems, but it doesn't make use of the Warden/Crusader divide the way Mass Effect (I got strong ME vibes various times while playing this) leaned into Paragon/Renegade scores. This might be a big ask for a game that was already up against project/budgetary constraints, but the player is reduced to passively sitting through cutscenes and making a single binary narrative decision. Probably less time on including Yet Another 'Mech Upgrade System and more time on building at least a few more story choices would've been more appropriate. I think people will generally enjoy the ending regardless of the choice they make, and most folks are gonna immediately reload that mission to see the alternate conclusion.
The one other letdown for me was the score, maybe it was just my subjective experience here, maybe it's how they implemented it, but it just didn't have the bombastic impact for me that previous titles have had. I accidentally fired up Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries a couple times during my Clan playthrough and the soundtrack on that loading screen hits so hard compared to the subdued music of MW5 Clans. There's also some moments where players are trying to deliver dialogue over the roar of battle, some missions have huge difficulty spikes, and there's the occasional frame-rate drop/'mech stuck on terrain/random bug. I don't hold any of that stuff against the game or the developers, there's been buggy jank in Mechwarrior titles since Ghost Bear's Legacy. I'm sure it will be mostly resolved via hotfixes.
Overall, I would give it an
8/10. I think there's a lot on offer here, you're gonna absolutely feel that you got your money's worth out of the experience. If it's guilty of anything it's being over-stuffed, and there's worse sins you can commit while creating a video game.
