I love a clunky-ass videogame title. Some may argue that videogame names should be kept simple and punchy, like Doom or Quake or BioShock. I would counter that your videogame isn’t truly a videogame unless the name has at least two punctuation marks in it. I’m talking Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, or my personal favourite, The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners – Chapter 2: Retribution. If you don’t have to pause for breath while saying it, it isn’t a proper videogame.
MechWarrior 5: Clans is relatively mundane as titles go, but the newly released expansion for Piranha Games’ mech shooter elevates it to wondrous new levels of silliness. The DLC is called MechWarrior 5: Clans – Ghost Bear: Flash Storm, which is objectively the greatest name for a game ever. What is a Ghost Bear? Why is there a Flash Storm? I must know the answer to these questions!
In fairness, Ghost Bear: Flash Storm has considerably more to it than a silly name. This is a beefy expansion that adds a whole new campaign to MechWarrior 5, one that sees you piloting the mechs of Clan Ghost Bear’s Silveroot Keshik (that’s my first question answered) an elite squad of mech pilots dedicated to demonstrating the glory of their ursine spectre tribe.
The new campaign features 12 missions that’ll see you fight for control of the planet Alshain, a world heavily industrialised for mech production. You’ll also take the fight beyond the planet’s atmosphere, warring for dominance over orbital factories and fighting on the hull of the Ghost Bear’s command ship, the grizzly. I love a game that lets me fight on the outside of a spaceship. It’s why Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is my favourite CoD campaign since 4.
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The expansion also brings eight new pilotable mechs, four of these are OmniMechs — the Night Gyr, Ebon Jaguar, Fire Moth, and Huntsman. The other four are battlemechs—the 100-ton Kodiak assault mech, 35-ton scout Jenner IIC, 50-ton Hunchback IIC (for my money, one of the most iconic silhouettes in BattleTech), and 65-ton Rifleman IIC. You’ll be able to customise these hulking war machines in an expanded mechlab, where you’ll even be able to swap the engines of your colossal bipedal tanks.
Ghost Bear: Flash Storm is available now for $20 (£16.75). If you’ve yet to sample the delights of vanilla MechWarrior 5: Clans, PC Gamer contributor Jonathan Bolding had a pretty great time with it when he reviewed it last year, judging its focussed narrative campaign to be worth the loss of more sandbox-oriented play. “Though the lack of sandbox play is most felt when you’re still itching for more at the end, I still loved the bombastic cinematics and intimate character moments that Clans chose over endless procedural content.”
