MechWarrior 5: Clans’ AI is terrible, but with humans it’s transcendent

Early last week, gaming stores published their reviews of everything MechWarrior 5: Clansand while Polygon wasn’t there, it’s not for lack of trying. Over the past few months I’ve been running into some hardware issues thanks to my bruised and battered gaming laptop. Not unexpected, mind you, but very difficult when you are working with a deadline. But this is how the sausage is made on this side of the internet, and these things happen.

For that reason, I’ve withheld my most pointed criticism of the game since launch. For example, I can’t determine whether the gruesome movement of the character’s lips and teeth as they chew their lines of dialogue is a me problem or a developer problem. The same goes for the screen tearing, low frame rate, and general poor performance of the game on my personal device before launch. As it stands, I’m doing much better – although the cinematics often lag far behind the audio in cutscenes. But in terms of gameplay, it seems like the day one patch has fixed the most glaring issues I had with the client.

And yet one part still doesn’t feel right to me, almost as bad as 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 very bad at being MechWarriors.

In my experience, the allied AI – that is, the other members of your Clan Star of five that you fight from the start of the game – is pretty much useless when the virtual shit hits the fan. I’ve grown tired of seeing them wander into my line of fire, only to be hosed down with a stray shot from a gauss rifle. Occasionally, the AI ​​character piloting my rocket boat will scream into battle with a flamethrower before firing a single long-range burst. When things really get going, it looks more like a group of heavily armed kids playing post-apocalyptic football than a post-human cadre of genetically engineered super soldiers. They keep jumping out of their badly damaged mechs and escaping into orbit, condemning me to carry out the same missions over and over again. There’s not even a way to save your progress mid-mission, making brute-force saving completely off the table.

So even on the game’s lowest difficulty setting, I still find myself having to restart and do missions two, three, four or more times before I walk away aggravated. So last week I called up some friends, had them download the game for free through their Xbox Game Pass subscriptions, and set out with a team of three real people to tackle the game’s “normal” difficulty.

What followed was an hour of absolutely stunning action. We defeated the enemy, crushed all resistance in front of us, and looked good doing it. More importantly, I noticed that the game was starting to tell a much more satisfying, action-packed story – one that I could finally take the time to enjoy.

Until then, inside MechWarrior 5: ClansI had spent almost all of my time micromanaging my AI teammates, pressing the fire-on-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 stance between attack or defense, for example. It also doesn’t allow you to dictate which weapons they will use to attack the enemy in a given situation, or at what distances they will use them – a key feature of both BattleTech and MechWarrior since its birth on the tabletop in the eighties. Instead, players only have a limited number of options: you can tell your allies where to stand, and you can tell them whether or not to shoot at your target. That’s pretty much it.

But last night was different. From her direct-fire mech, Polygon’s Alice Jovanée was able to land shots with pinpoint accuracy. When we needed her to take out the most devastating enemy weapons from a distance, she did so expertly. Once her own primary weapons system was disabled by enemy fire, she was able to change her tactics on the spot by closing in with a devastating battery of ballistic machine guns. Meanwhile, I and another friend lay in the enemy’s legs, avoiding hitting Alice with friendly fire thanks to careful communication.

Later, after my own primary weapon went offline, that same friend was able to come to my aid in combat, shouldering an enemy mech the equivalent of a 40-ton linebacker.

The game not only became simpler, but also more cinematic. Without the idiotic stuff of childish AI clogging the foreground, I could finally see the well-designed terrain in the background. Freed from the moment-to-moment fear of watching my team get chewed to pieces, I was able to observe the tactics the enemy AI used to continue the fight. After gaining some breathing room, I was finally able to appreciate how grand its scope and scale was MechWarrior 5: Clans really and truly. It’s better than by leaps and bounds MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries.

Yet this is by no means a perfect multiplayer game. For example, there is no integrated voice chat, so you are on your own for that. You’ll need a Nintendo Switch-style friend code to play on multiple platforms. Furthermore, only the presenter can advance the storyline 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 fun with a few people by your side. Whether that hefty caveat is worth the $49.99 asking price is up to you, but if you’re a subscriber to Xbox Game Pass, then here’s a multiplayer experience you shouldn’t miss.

MechWarrior 5: Clans was released on October 16 on PC, as well as for Xbox and PlayStation consoles. The game was previewed on a Windows PC using a pre-release download code from Piranha Games. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. Additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.