Been messing around in MW5: Clans lately with a buddy (guess which one he is)
Game's fun enough but not amazing. PGI's voice direction has never been great and they're really stretching themselves to their limits with the campaign here. There's one VA I recognize from MW5: Mercs who is doing a good job but he's also playing like 5 or 6 different extras, which makes any time he shows up more jarring than anything else. The squad also sounds bored most of the time, even in active firefights.
Mission design is mostly alright. PGI still hasn't quite figured out how to do more than just throw hordes of mechs at the player in waves, but it actually kinda works for a Clan-focused campaign. Their improvements to the command systems are also a gigantic step up from how things played in MW5: Mercs, although I do struggle to find ways of using them outside of hot-swapping so I can put a different mech up front for a while.
The issue of all roads leading to the assault conga line seems to still be present, which makes the option of specializing your pilots into light or medium mechs more confusing than anything else. I haven't had a reason to take any in 3 or 4 hours.
Map design trends to the higher end of the Mercs handcrafted missions. The only real bugbear is that brawling seems to be always optimal due to how ranges shake out, making stuff like the ER-Large laser almost complete overkill unless you happen to get a bomber thrown at you, so the optimal play is to boat medium lasers (or ER-PPCs for huge alpha strikes). Kinda the same issue Mercs had with medium lasers but more pronounced. The preponderance of box canyons also means skirmisher gameplay is pretty limited in scope.
Overall it's like a 6/10. Good fun if you want to load up an assault mech and kill your enemies with the power of disco but it won't be winning any awards. I'm cautiously optimistic PGI will pull out something interesting for later DLC though; they iterated quickly enough with Mercs and have iterated further with Clans. Hopefully they'll keep improving.
