While I can’t honestly call myself a diehard MechWarrior fan – I’ve never played the pen-and-paper roleplaying game, for instance – I have enjoyed many of the video games over the years, from MechWarrior 3 to both MechAssault games on Xbox. I skipped the original version of MechWarrior 5 because, while it was by most accounts a good game, its content was all procedurally generated. It wasn’t narrative-driven. And I love a good story-first MechWarrior campaign.

MechWarrior 5: Clans, then, appears to be exactly what I’ve been asking for: a narrative-led MechWarrior campaign that also happens to offer five-player co-op. It picks up immediately where 2019’s MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries – itself the first single-player MechWarrior game of any kind since 2002 – left off. I got a first-look demo of Clans and really liked what I saw.

Clans casts you as Smoke Jaguar clan in, as usual, the 31st century amid ongoing clan-based Mech warfare. You’ve got five teammates to work with: Jayden, Liam, Mia, Nasir, and Ezra. You’ll hear the most from Jayden, the star’s leader (a star is a group of five Mechs in the BattleTech universe, if you weren’t familiar). When playing in single-player you can either take direct control of any of them at any given time, or you can issue orders from either a quickly accessed radial menu or a battlefield map that you can pull up anytime – all of it in real-time without any pausing of the combat. For what it’s worth, they seem reasonably good at executing those orders if you leave the friendly AI to do the work.

When playing in single-player you can either take direct control of any of them at any given time, or you can issue orders from either a quickly accessed radial menu or a battlefield map that you can pull up anytime – all of it in real-time without any pausing of the combat. Naturally, all of the usual MechWarrior features are here: jump jets, tons of Mech variety (my demo driver was piloting a Shadow Cat, though I’ve always favored the slower but harder-hitting Assault class Atlas myself), and plenty of weapon loadouts, from guns to missiles to lasers to gauss cannons. As ever, you can try to scattershot enemy Mechs with as much damage as possible with no regard to where those shots land, or you can pinpoint specific areas of each Mech, such as trying to blow off its arms or causing it to topple over by blasting off one of its legs.

Speaking of controls, mouse and keyboard input and output looked smooth, from what I could see, and developer Piranha Games promises slick gamepad controls as well, which should please folks who plan to play Clans on Xbox or PS5. On that note, Piranha aims to ship both the PC and console versions of Clans simultaneously. Furthermore, you can opt for a first-person camera or see your Mech from a third-person perspective.

While the underlying action seems solid – as you’d expect after Piranha’s already taken a bite at the MechWarrior 5 apple – it’s the 31st-century sci-fi struggle I am most eager to see from the story. I enjoyed seeing orders come in from Sarah Weaver through a picture-in-picture window as you stomped around the battlefield, and I’m eager to see where this MechWarrior’s story takes us. Gameplay, meanwhile, seems faster than what I remember from the joystick-preferred older MechWarrior offerings on PC, but certainly not as speedy as the Xbox’s classic MechAssault games.

It’s great to see single-player take center stage once again in a MechWarrior game, though the fact that you can bring along up to four friends in five-player co-op is a nice bonus for Clans. It’s due out later this year. I, for one, can’t wait to get back to the future.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.