Image: Piranha Games

I'm a little worried for Piranha Games, the studio behind MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, Clans and Online. They've been hit by layoffs and squeezed for resources. And yet, you'd never know it considering how they're doubling down on the scope and ambition of their expansions. Today, Ashes and Ascension drops, the latest in a series of story-heavy campaigns for MW5: Mercs, dragging the primarily-sandbox mech-war sim in a new direction. And for us mech nerds, this is finally our chance to be part of one of the setting's biggest throwdowns: Operation Bulldog.

While most earlier expansions for MW5: Mercs were on building up the timeline and giving the player more options to take on contracts across its big mercenary sandbox mode, Piranha have switched directions towards more story-led campaigns with lengthy cutscenes. Recent expansions have been far more similar in style to the spinoff title, MW5: Clans. This new expansion is a lengthy 18-mission campaign set around Operation Bulldog, a plot to revive the banner of the Star League (the pre-collapse galactic government) and take down Clan Smoke Jaguar, an invading force from the galaxy's edge that the player was fighting for in MW5: Clans.

This carries on from the previous story expansion, Chaos Reign, which was fascinatingly a direct sequel to the weird '90s BattleTech cartoon series, featuring both returning characters and voice actors, and writing MW5: Mercs' player character into the greater canon. Even though the core timeline of MechWarrior/BattleTech has been nailed down for a long time, it's great to see studios still playing with these toys, and with some impressive AA gloss, too. There's word that MW5: Clans is also due another story-heavy expansion in the new year. The studio are really cranking them out, it seems.

On top of the new story missions, the expansion brings a whole lot with it, much of it delivered in a big free update. The patch notes are extensive, but there's 18 new mech variants to play around with, and a bunch of new vehicles to stomp on, including the infamous Hetzer, which is little more than a lightly-armored truck with a giant cannon on it, capable of putting a gigantic hole in a mech but also famous for popping like a soap bubble if you even look at it hard. There's new hero traits, an option to disable view bobbing on the targeting reticle, and the Cantina will let you draw more contracts from various DLC packs, of which there have now been nine.

On the expansion-exclusive side of things, there's 13 new basic mech types, including the return of the Stone Rhino, a super-heavy mech usually seen packing four giant guns, and one of the designs that was originally 'borrowed' from awkwardly-localized anime Robotech. There's a bunch more mech variants to find, and eleven new late-generations, including new versions of my favorite weapon type - LB-X shotgun cannons, for when you want to unload a hundred pounds of buckshot into someone's face at point blank. Good times. Did I mention that I'm a lifelong MechWarrior nerd? Yeah, you probably guessed.

MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries - Ashes and Ascension is out now for £17.75/$20. And at the time of writing the base game is 75% off, with much of the earlier DLC being heavily discounted too. Although if you want a more story-based starting point, then you could do much worse than MechWarrior 5: Clans. The only down-side to today's expansion is that it's also likely to break the game's MANY mods again, so it'll likely be a couple weeks before everything's updates and functioning as intended again.