BATTLETECH

Loading screens, AI turn processing, mech movement. Everything takes a rediculously long time. Everything. You will spend most of your game time waiting for things to happen. You can't even get up to go to grab a drink while your ship moves to a new planet as there are obnoxious little dialog boxed events that pop up and hault the flow of time. Nope. You're sitting there for the whole 15-jump ride just incase you need to "recreate the Authentic Tripple-F burger" for the 3rd time. Other Gripes: *The campaign is short and story cliche. *Dropped frames and stuttering: even on state-of-the-art gaming PCs. *Texture quality, poly count and "physics" of object destruction are 10-15 years out of date. (On par with phone games) *Lack of adjustable difficulty ensures persons unafflicted by lobotomy will breeze though. *AI Is suicidally dumb -- Mechs and Vehicles frequently confused by terrain. *Multiplayer, though much more challenging, is (as of release) dominated by missiles and flamers. *...which gives me the sneaking suspicion that the MANY things left out of the game (anti-missile PD, LBXs, CASE, etc. etc.), though present in every other title set in this universe, are being held for DLC. All in all, this seems more like a Game Dev's senior project than a commercial product worthy of wearing the Battletech brand. Unless you love Battletech, this is easily a pass. Even then, I'd wait till it's 50% off, they've addressed the (relatively minor) bugs and SEVERE performance issues. Pros: *Worse Games Exist? *Thousands (including myself) learned a valuable lesson re: Kickstarter funded Vidya games.

Nice tactical layer, decent economical side, solid graphics and mood. Combat have might be faster, especially when heavier mechs fight. Customization options are very close to boardgame. Nice OST, worth buying separately.Story is engaging, NPCs are easy to attach. Not only quality of lore is solid, but also its delivery (a lot of fluff, tags, histories etc - I hope that they will affect the missions more). Unfortunately, it is unstable (3 crashes for 4 hours of play). Even worse are sluggish loadings (5 mins to load just the basic menu on i7/SS/GTX1070, is processing the entry menu really so demanding?). I recommend to wait for patched version, especially if they also improve the pacing of the combat. I guess it will be similar to Shadowruns - it will get better after a few patches. If they do, I would buy some DLCs, because it has potential for solid strategic depth, even more complex than XCOM2 (vanilla). When it works, it has great visuals and nice depth,it has potential to 4 or 4,5 if the campaign unfolds nicely. Unfortunately it does not work well at this build.

I've been enjoying the gameply a lot. It occupies a cool niche and it's a tonne of fun. I would be happy to waste a whole weekend on it if I could. The problem is that it runs like crap: The first mission I run when I start the game up has audio issues every time. Music and sound effect cut out when they overlap, and its fixed for the next mission. The loading times from a m.2 drive are way too long, like 10x longer than they have any right to be. I can boot up my laptop and start playing another game before the campagn loads on this. And the worst part is that the game softlocks a lot. Sometime when you order certain actions (attack, move, jump, sensor lock, any bloody action you can make,) the game will just go into the action cam and just stay there. I once left it alone for 40 mins and it hadn't got over the hurdle. Add that to the fact that reloading the save just repeats the problem and you suddently have to close the game, launch it again, suffer through that insane load time and have buggy audio on your mission. It's so frustrating that I just close the game and I leave it alone til the next day. This softlock has happened every goddam day since I purchase this. Every play session ends with my quitting because the game has locked up. I'd say buy it in a year's time, when it hits a 75% sale and a few patches have fixed it.

As a long time fan of the Battletech tabletop game and the may video games bearing the name, this game was an easy sell. Sadly, it has not lived up to anything I expected and it is possible it will not meet your expectations either. CONS: DRM (IMO) - Either I missed it completely, buried in some fine print, or it wasn't actually stated. But there is a nice warning on the store page here that will tell you. Unless you want to create an account on the Paradox website you will be playing solo. Also, in what might be a first. You will not get your pre-order reward (skins) unless you create an account on the Paradox website. Personally, I see this just as a form of DRM to limit multiplayer in this way. Gameplay - There is a single player skirmish (fixed maps, no randomized maps) and a campaign. From what I have seen playing it all day the Mech company you create in the campaign does not cross over to the skirmish games. As for the campaign itself, it is a linear by the numbers deal. It is in no way similar to the MechWarrior games of old when you created a Mech company and ran around doing whatever you want. Bugs - The game has a tight economy aspect and that is fine. But it seems that you cannot sell a mech that you have. You can only sell them for scrap. No idea how that even works, but here we are. Crashing (black screen) seems to be a hidden gem for you to find also. Mechanics - As someone whom still owns all of the original technical readout books. I can tell you there is no such thing as "laser hard points" on a mech. You are severely limited in building your own mechs with this artificial limitation. Also medium lasers do NOT do 12 points of damage. Other liberties have also been taken with mech design; far too many to list here. PROS: The game looks very nice on the battlefield. They clearly skipped on all aspects outside of the battles (still shots, voice overs, etc.) but at least the battles look pretty. RECOMMENDATION: It is nice for say, a $25 game.