GamerEscape

Over this past year, I’ve done a fair bit of coverage for Mechwarrior 5: Clans. As someone who enjoyed the earlier games and the Battletech arcade pods back in the day, I was of course excited. So when the developers dropped some DLC for their newest games, of course I had to check it out. I expected to check out the new modes, drum up a little hype, nothing much more. Things… weren’t quite as simple as I’d planned.

So, first off, what’s actually in the DLC? It has several new skins, almost every mech has had a new omnipod layout that could allow you to play a favorite mech in a new way, and most of all it had two multiplayer-focused modes added: a PVP arena and a PVE horde defense. Both are still playable single-player with bots.

That said, this wasn’t very substantial. I’ve never been huge on cosmetics and while the new skins aren’t *bad* per se… they’re basically of the same quality as the skins already in the game. So there’s not much to say about them. The new omnipods also seem to follow the “more of the same” mantra. Their addition is appreciated, sure, but I feel like I’d need to get deep in the weeds of optimization to find situations where I’d need them over another omnipod or mech chassis.

That just leaves the two modes. Arena seems like it *could* be fun if I had folks to play with, though it is a little disappointing that the maps are just repeats of areas we visited during the main campaign. As a single player experience I feel like I’d rather just replay the missions again for the variety of targets and objectives, over just having four respawning enemies to smoke as many times as I can.

Finally, there’s horde mode. Probably the one I was most excited to see, the format actually makes it feel different than many of the fights during the main game. You’re defending a single point, but between each wave repair stations respawn (notably only four, with five of you present, and on opposite sides of the map), and turrets you can hack go offline requiring you to scan them again. Repair stations didn’t really show up a lot in the base game, and for a lot of it I felt that overwhelming offense was usually the answer to everything. Here you’re encouraged to play it safe since you’re trying to go for as long as you can, and any damage that gets past your armor to your actual structure is not something you can repair mid-mission.

Unfortunately, horde mode still needs a bit of love. On a few occasions I got decently far, only to have the game crash or for an incoming wave to glitch in such a way that I couldn’t attack them, rendering the wave unfinishable. In both of these cases, you’re kinda out of luck for any XP your pilots or mechs may have acquired. Speaking of which, on the runs where I did get an ending the rewards seemed rather lackluster. Yeah there’s some bonus pilot XP for hitting certain waves, but like all simpod secondary objectives you can only get these once. For a game with a fair few things to grind for, I feel like a replayable multiplayer mode would be the perfect thing to encourage using for the grind and instead you’d be better off doing just anything else.

So, the DLC was a bit of a wash. While I was playing through this, I recall thinking to myself that this felt like maybe $5 of DLC, and I could see a publisher trying to push for $10. Just an extremely small addition that could have been an update. Turns out, it was $20.

Key word here is “was.”

While I was in the middle of writing this, the devs came out and announced that the DLC would now be a free update, and everyone who had purchased it would be refunded. It would seem I was not the only one who thought this DLC wasn’t nearly worth the cost.

This raises some interesting questions. Yes, it’s nice to see a company actually reverse and fix their mistake when customers are upset; great response from them. However there’s still the fact that they tried to charge this much for a glorified update, and only after folks got mad about it did they change things. An apology doesn’t erase the attempt in the first place.

Is $20 worth getting bent out of shape over? Probably not in the grand scheme of things, but that’s like a third of a whole game. For that much I’d be expecting some brand new mechs and not just skins and customization, or a new side campaign instead of some multiplayer modes that plenty of games just have as default. It’s frustrating as well because Mechwarrior 5: Clans is certainly a game that could have done with more content, I’d love to see some DLC that actually adds to the experience, but I definitely feel a lot of the playerbase is going to be looking skeptically at any future DLC announcements.

Review access provided by Piranha Games. Screenshots taken by writer.