BATTLETECH

Hello, my name is Butchbird and I am a battletechoholic. *crowd* Hi Butchbird. So this brief intro does illustrate that I am biased...Still, this game would be fantastic even if it wasn't set in the battletech universe. Build up your lance, choose your contracts, modify your units, level up your pilots. Sudenly, travelling between two star systems, one of your top pilots comes in your office, gives you the whole "why am I still alive after seeing so many of my buddies die", you open up a bottle of brandy and tell em its gonna be alright. Sing up for an easy contract 'cause you need those 500k bucks to buy a new cannon...then one of the enemy units gets a lucky hit and your brooding pilot get sent to valhalla while you look in bewilderment. Then you resist the urge of reloading 'cause this chain of events was that damn awesome. This game cost me a new computer...and in 10 years I'll still be playing. A must have for gamers who like science fiction and strategy games involving few units.

The story and presentation are quite nice, as are the mech customization, your mercenary outfit management and picking missions. It's a really good game, but part of me wishes it was more true to boardgame rules.

The battletech sim you've always wanted. Pros -fantastic translation of the tabletop games rules and feel -copious mech customization options -good voice acting -intelligent enemy ai -entertaining if basic story cons -lots of waiting: ai turns and loading screens Overall A must play for strategy fans and Battletech fans

So, here on launch day the game has some bugs, I'll let other reviewers share their experiences directly but the only issue that I personally had was lack of good 21:9 monitor support. So for now I'm playing in windowed instead of fullscreen while they sort that out. Gameplay is great though. Music is good, story so far is good, characters seem fun, blowing things up goes just as it should. I give it one bonus point for selectable pronoun during character customization (note -- you can only customize your own character, not your crew) and I give it ten bonus points for quality cutscenes that are thankfully skippable if you replay. The UI takes some learning, it's got a lot of elements and some of them are not quite where I expected to find them. I wish it would display weapon effective ranges in a more visual way (it DOES tell you the effective ranges, just.... not in my preferred style). But on the whole it's quite good once you get a battle or two under your belt, the method starts to sink in and it makes sense. I would definitely recommend this game to anyone who likes turn-based tactics.

I've been pre-ordering Harebrained Scheme's games for a while now. Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall, Hong Kong. I loved them all and they were 5-star games with great gameplay and story. I thought this would be awesome too. Unfortunately Battletech is just really slow-paced and the difficulty is crushing. I love turn based games, and beat each of the shadowrun games and enjoyed the entire experience. But you spend way too much time watching the enemy take their turns in Battletech. The animations are far too long, and it's just frustrating waiting for your turn to come around. I rarely felt frustrated in SRR (and never this much) so that surprised me. Then the difficulty. I gave up when you rescuse the princess from the pirate base on some moon (one of the first story missions) because it was just ridiculous. It was described as a low difficulty mission, and the boss pirate mech was described as being made of junk. The junk pirate boss destroyed two of my mediums, and tore the arms off my remaining medium. My last medium mech got into a kicking fight with the boss after this because she had lost her arms too. The repair bill, combined with waiting for repairs, completely sucked up the million dollar payout and then some, leaving me with little money left and I eventually hit bankruptcy and lost the game. If that was an easy battle, I dread what hard ones would be like. I also question the repair costs, medical bay downtime, and repair downtime. I just don't think it's balanced well at all. Basically it's not fun to play, and I regret buying this ahead of time. I did so based on my previous good experiences with games by HBS, but won't be doing that again.