BATTLETECH

Aside from the slight performance issues ( which are being worked on ) the game runs well on my ancient rig. It's clear the art director "gets it" when it comes to the look and feel of the Battletech universe. The music belongs as well, never taking over the experience but adding to it. The game play is suitably deliberate. There is a lot of details to consider when moving a mech for optimal effect. It's turned based, you like it or not but it never feels forced or artificial. I'm thoroughly enjoying my time with it and will for quite some time since you can keep going after the main story ends.

So I'm a biased Battletech fan who of course is going to give this 5/5. So lets talk about my major issues and what I like. Let's discuss the elephant in the room, the whole 'SJW nonsense'. So what Battletech offers is instead of a Sex option they just call it Pronoun, he, she, and they. He shows all the male portraits, she shows all the female portraits, and they shows both. To me I thought it was funny when I saw it because now I'm most of the way through the game and haven't noticed anything else. They say they're adding a way to speed up combat animations: good, they game can take a while for a round to process (espescially escsort missions when you have 4 slow APCs doing their thing). A way to speed that up would be nice. The game hits FPS drops but not where you expect, during travel the Jumpship animation just absolutely chugs all the way down to single digits, it doesn't effect my gameplay but it just makes me wonder why its so slow. All in all I enjoy the story so far, i'm currently 2/3 through the game if looking at the video archive is a good indicator, and I enjoy the political clusterf*** you're expected to perform in. Because House Davion did X the Taurian Concordact does Y Which Makes the bad guys do Z so you do A which leads to B and now C so therefore D occurs, which I find enjoyable.

The biggest bug in this game is the fact that I have to inconveniently Alt-Tab out to select my favourate Mechwarrior 2 tracks from YouTube...

While not for everybody, I can not believe how addicting this is. There is something about having 3 story tall war machines blowing chunks out of each other that just can not get old. All of my free time these days is spent running yet another mission. Made by the same people who created the greatly enjoyable Shadowrun series, Battletech has you run a mercenary company whose job is to wage war with massive bi-pedal tanks. While the battles are endlessly addicting as stated, running the company is a whole other gmae. And while a much simpler affair, it is here where you win or lose. You can spend hours tweaking your Mechs and pilots skills. Then watch as they shred the opponents in the battles, or see them all get blown apart by bigger mechs. The only way to lose is to go bankrupt. If you will enjoy this game comes down to what your background is. If you already like Battletech: the Tabletop game, Mechwarrior, Mechcommander, then you will love this. If you enjoy tactics games where every decision really matters, then I recommend you check this out. But if you are looking for a fast paced game of Jagged Alliance with robots, you might want to pass. This is a ponderous game, one where every choice could make a break something. But when things break...hooo boy! Like I said, once you start..it's hard to stop. Just to clarify, there were some GPU issues overheating some systems, but those were patched in the first week. I have had no problems since, and they have already announced some upcoming material.

It's a solid turn based strategy, if you enjoyed X-com it's not too far off from that only with large robots. The only minor issue anyone can complain about is loading times, which I would venture a guess that patches over time will resolve that. The play time itself is challenging and enjoyable, so if you're a fan of turn based this will easily win you over!