BATTLETECH - Mercenary Collection

Pros: A pretty faithful adaptation of the tabletop title. Having the computer crunch the tabletop numbers and dice rolls is nice. Looks and sounds great. Cons: Where to start? Poor Optimization, there is a bug that the more saves you have the slower the game gets until it crashes and becomes unusable. Maps are small, making faster mechs more useless and no possibility to evade or avoid conflicts which seems to be part of some of the mission designs. Speaking of, the only way the game knows to make things challenging is to outnumber you 3 to 1 on almost every mission. That is being generous. It is not uncommon to try and run your 4 mech lance against up to 5 enemy lances in a single mission. Be prepared for attrition, and then spending ages trying to repair your mechs and heal your pilots. You can never field more than 4 mechs. Ever. You can own and hold 3 lances, but you can never send more than four. It feels so wasted when there seems to be no reason that you should deploy that many. As a whole this reflects the whole design of this game, there is some disconnect between mission design that seems to expect you to have multiple lances on a large map. An instead, you are shooting your way out of a 1 on 4 dogpile in the center of the map every mission. Lack of supporting units is the final frustrating element for me. No scout shoppers, signal probes, resupply or repair drones. Even some air support would be nice. These were elements in Mech Commander and I loved it. I so wish that vehicle support was an option here, but it isn't. Overall it is very fun for awhile but then the main issues will begin to drag down the enjoyment of a game that feels like it has lost so much potential. Honestly, if you can find mech commander Gold somewhere, with it's cheesey cut scenes, it's arguably the better game.

This game is an outstanding realisation of the Battletech universe as it would be played on the tabletop. It is turn based and a good understanding of how the math works helps to do well early on. Once you have explored the official DLC there are some very good community mods that really make this game stand out. I have 200+ hours in the game (mercenary edition with dlc) and I'm not even close to putting it down. Check YouTube to see how the turn based system works. This is not for everyone, but you never lose because you have a low end pc or bad internet. You only lose because of your decisions or bad luck. I love this game and after reading the books and playing Mechwarrior as a kid, this is everything I wanted. Considering the cost of setting up the tabletop game this is the best money I've spent at GOG.

I have over 200 hours in this game and that's without mods which would add even more variety. I personally bought the Mercenary collection and I have no regrets doing that. If you have even a passing interest in the BattleTech universe, you need this game. Period. It's a fairly faithful adaption of the tabletop game with some Alpha Strike elements thrown in. It's not a one for one conversion, but it's definitely familiar for fans. The campaign is pretty fun with a decent story, but I enjoyed playing the career mode much more. Playing on IronMan mode is a good challenge and one thing about this game is that you can tweak just about every aspect of it to customize how challenging you want it. I also played through the game using the Galaxy client and the achievement integration with that works flawlessly. I recommend getting the Mercenary collection without any hesitation, but if you are on the fence with all of the DLC options, then I'd suggest getting the Heavy Metal DLC at a minimum. It adds a lot more mechs and the flashpoint campaign that it introduces is my favorite of all the flashpoints introduced in the DLC packs. There are several mods for this game that I haven't tried out yet, but many of them look really good. In short, you will get a ton of replayability with this game. It's just awesome, destructive fun.

The game is solid, built with good amount of details and depth, especially the flash points. Campaign mode is...... Tutorial-ish. Loading times are way too long for a game like this. And gets longer the more you play! Wait times between action can be tedious. They have the option to speed things up.. But still too draggy. Overall a great experience with minor blemishes.