MechWarrior 5: Clans Review (Miss_TakeVT)
Overall the campaign is an improvement to the Mercs campaign and the game has a lot of improvements to graphics and maps where you'll be stomping around but in its current state it's not in a state that I would say it's worth 40 dollars, let alone the 50 dollars that PGI is asking you to pay for this and there's a number of areas that the game suffers and as a single player game it falls flat. You really do need 2-4 friends to play this game and really enjoy it because your friendly AI is inexcusably bad and it's painfully clear that no work has been made to help the brainless AI that we had in Mercs.
Braindead AI
So far I've gotten to what appears to be the climax of the game completely solo and I got so frustrated with the AI that I uninstalled the game and I am seriously considering requesting a refund for this game. I feel cheated of the 3 days off I took from work to play this game and I personally blame Russ Bullock for this and It's my deepest wish that he drags his balls across a mile of broken glass as penance for this inexcusable AI. Here's a non-exhaustive list of the issues with the AI I've found.
pilots their mechs in front of the player after being ordered to attack an enemy
Immediately turn and show their backs to the enemy after their target is destroyed
refuse to go more than 80% of their top speed
refuse to shoot their weapons more than once if their heat hasn't completely dissipated
if ordered to defend an area, they'll stand there and refuse to move or react to any damage or attacks on them.
follow the player in a straight line, not in any senescence of a military formation.
Will ignore any vehicle or mech that are not their attack target, they'll happily allow an SRM carrier get right up next to them and dump SRMs into their backs.
Battle Grid
While playing Mercs many players and I wished we had more control of our AI lance mates, and with that the monkey's paw curled. The UI for the battle grid is clunky and frustrating to use in combat and is not worth using in the middle of combat as you're the only person that is doing as steady amount of damage per second since you have 4 lobotomy victims who are only use is to take damage and frustrate you.
Horrible Post Mission Looting
at the end of each mission you salvage either Mech Parts, Weapon Parts or Equipment parts that you use for the research screen to get various minor buffs. The issue is that you have can't easily change the values of the 3 different salvage types but you need a ton of weapons parts but it's so clunky and annoying to get the desired number you want of the 3 types of salvage.
Annoying buffs to non-Mechs
There's no reason a Tank or Air Vehicle can tank a Gauss Shot, this is stupid and doesn't make sense.
Clunky UI in the meta game
Did you think that the Merc's mechlab was well made and actually worked? Did the MWO mechlab also seam functional and pretty good to get to change out the loadouts? Well you'll be incredibly disappointed when you have to work with Clan's mechlab, you'll have to go from page to page to get the mech build that you used in MWO. You'll constantly go from page to page to do what you could do in 1 page in Mercs.
Final Thoughts
Overall the game is balance for Co-op, there's no way that anyone in PGI playtested the game with all AI members of their star. There's no real replay value in this game. The AI will frustrate you and ruin several missions so you'll have to restart over and over because they take so much damage without actually contributing and the AI is so bad that it breaks your immersion, these are supposed to be warriors bred to be the best warriors, but with how bad they are, they'll ruin any of the story beats. at the end, I did not care about the characters at the end with how frustrating dealing with them in the game. Instead if you haven't played Mercs, play that instead with TTRulez_AIMod2. I'll link them below. In the current state, this game is no longer fun at the end game, mainly due to the crappy AI that was failed to be improved upon by PGI.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/784080/MechWarrior_5_Mercenaries/
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2607562264