The Ghost Bear Flash Storm DLC is a strong continuation of Mechwarrior 5: Clans, adding a decent-sized new campaign and a selection of new mechs and some additional features. Granted, I wasn't a huge fan of the approach that the base game had versus the earlier Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries, and this new campaign is just as linear and heavily story-driven as the base campaign was. It does hit the ground running, though, so if you are looking for more of what Clans had to offer, the new Ghost Bear DLC is a solid continuation.

I talked about it in my Clans review, but it remains the case here: Ghost Bear's campaign is very much geared around telling its story as it wants to tell it. You get dropped into the action immediately and play as the leader of a star of Clan Ghost Bear mechs after the events of Clans. Though the clan is on the back foot, Khans Jorgenson and Kabrinski are trying to stake their claim in the early phases of the clan invasion of the inner sphere. The star recently lost one of their pilots, and he has been replaced by Jonathan, whose level of green around the ears rubs the other star mates the wrong way, considering their star is supposed to be one of the clan's elites.

The campaign jumps right into things; it doesn't spend a ton of cut scenes painfully establishing the characters. You don't just learn about them via gameplay; there is a lot more that is either implied or inferred as you listen to them over comms. It means that the longer cut scenes that dive into their backstories feel more interesting and are a nice change of pace. I found myself more interested in learning more about them than I did of my star mates in Clans because of this change of approach.

The campaign missions are still awfully linear, and I maintain that after coming from the more open maps of Mercenaries, I am still not a fan of every mission boiling down to navigating a series of box canyons connected by yet-narrower canyons to kill whatever group of mechs are going to spawn when I get there. Much as it was in the base game, enemies spawn in a way that feels like a fancier version of them popping out of hidden doors in the older Doom games. This time, it's enemy mechs hopping over the upper edge of the canyon that you can never get to or dropping in via dropship.

The linearity does get arguably worse at one point in the campaign when your star is tasked with attacking an enemy space station. The mission sounds awesome until you realize that the resulting gameplay on the massive station becomes almost literally a relatively slow-paced corridor shooter. You'll be navigating pathways barely wide enough for three mechs to walk side by side to reach the next larger "room" that becomes a forced shooting gallery. Throughout the campaign, the real difficulty comes from the sheer number of enemy mechs you are required to dispatch, to the point that I'm starting to wonder if Clan Ghost Bear has more than one or two stars. It seems a tad silly when in every mission, we're outnumbered ten to one in a way that makes the plot armor of my star both overly apparent and relied upon.

The DLC takes the opportunity to at least try cool ideas like that, so I have to give it credit. One beat point that lands much better is the mission where you have to engage in mech combat while on the outside of the hull of Clan Ghost Bear's command ship. With super low gravity, jump jets go a long way, and sure it's a little gimmicky of a mission, but I was too busy having fun shooting at enemy fighters that were trying to strafe us and blasting some enemy mechs that dropped onto the bow of the ship. The main game campaign could never seem to get out of its own way, so it's refreshing that the DLC campaign has missions set on space stations and on the hull of spaceships.

New to this DLC is the inclusion of Elementals, which are relatively smaller "mechs" that are basically dudes in power armor that fly around and cause a little chaos among the full-size mechs. On every campaign mission, you have a squad of Elementals fighting alongside you. You don't have separate control of them, but they follow squad orders and otherwise autonomously attack whatever they can. If one gets taken out, they respawn a new one every so often, so you don't have to worry too much about their safety as opposed to that of your star mates. It is highly annoying to fight them, given their small size and the difficulty in landing shots on them. At one point, I had one of them landing on my mech's windshield and pounding on it in an attempt to break through, and my mech had nothing to effectively deal with a target so close and so small.

The new mechs are a nice addition, but about half of them become largely outclassed in the campaign fairly early on. The Fire Moth is fast as hell, and the new Jenner IIC and Huntsman are fun, but by the third or fourth mission of the 12-mission campaign, you're really needing to bring along mechs of a higher tonnage. The Ebon Jaguar and Night Gyr are both strong mechs, the latter of which feels downright overpowered in some configurations — not that I'm complaining, mind you. The beefy Kodiak is a welcome addition among the heaviest metal of mechs, and it makes the game less reliant upon the Dire Wolf being the go-to mech for late game use.

Ghost Bear Flash Storm is a strong DLC that, for better or worse, does well to continue the gameplay of Clans. The new campaign is shorter but stronger, and while not every new thing it tries works, it always ends up being interesting. The overly linear mission formats still don't appeal to me personally, but nonetheless, I found myself more interested in my star mates and the missions. With the new mechs and their availability to be used in the original campaign and other modes, there's a good amount of new content that the DLC adds, even though I still pine for missions where I feel less funneled into the places the game wants me to go.

Score: 7.5/10

Reviewed on: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, 64 GB RAM, NVidia RTX 4070 Ti