BATTLETECH

After about 25 hours of campaign play now, I have not had any crashes or game breaking bugs that some other reviewers have had. One thing people need to watch out for is that for some reason this game will have your GPU running at 100% and it will get very hot which can cause a lot of issues (crashes, freezing, etc) or even damage your GPU if your cooling is insufficient. If you have something like MSI Afterburner, or whatever the equivalent for the card you are using is, you can set a maximum temperature to prevent your GPU from getting too hot. Hopefully, it won't take too long for HBS to figure out why the heck this game works your GPU at 100% for no reason. As others have said, there are some optimization issues, like stuttering, long pauses, bad camera angles, and things of that sort during combat. Missions with bases and lots of enemy units are especially bad in this regard.. Nothing game breaking imo though. Hopefully fixed soon. Some people have said that the load times are absurdly long, but I have not found that to be the case personally. Most mission loads seem to be 15-20 seconds on my SSD, that doesn't seem excessively long to me. The combat is definitely the best part of this game. I think HBS needs to go back and rework some of the simulation aspects to make that part more fun. Refitting/repairing mechs can take a ridiculous amount of time, which somewhat ruins the fun of being able to modify your mechs. What good is modifying your mechs if they are then unavailable to use in missions? You can't just sit idle waiting weeks/months for everything to finish. It is boring for one thing, but also, you will find yourself running out of space bucks fast. TLDR version: Game has fun combat with some optimization issues. Rest of the game is not as good, but not bad either. Also, HBS needs to hire somebody to make better avatars for players, I wanted to play a female mechwarrior, but the portraits all look like men for some reason.

Hi everyone, before i give you my opinions on the game, i think you best know a little about me, my rig, and my past with Classic Paper & Dice BattleTech. I am 40yrs old, I love role playing games in general. While i was a Teen and throughout college I played both BattleTech Miniatures game and allot of Dungeons & Dragons paper and dice. My pc past time consisted of anything RPG, Simulation ect.... My Rig: (Nothing Fancy) 5yrs ago Budget Build machine Core I3 - 3rd gen. 16 gig ram 750ti video card Asus brand MB / Vid Lots of random SSD's & HDD's in system I am running BattleTech in Full HD, all settings maxed out. I have experienced load times of 1 min or less in most instances. I have logged about 9 hours of game play. I have not been successful in Logging into the Paradox system. I did pre-purchase this game on "Steam" before gog released it. The first mission and intro into your life took me approx 2hrs to complete, Everything pretty much scripted out for you at that stage. Being thrown into a financial nightmare, along with multiple other complications you set out to make your way in the galaxy. In the next 6 - 7 hrs of game play i have managed to turn my merc. group profitable, and now i am working on lucrative contracts. My gaming experience in the technical side seems to be very different from many complaints i have seen. I have had no problems with the interface, I have not experienced any crashes, and the game seems to run very smooth over all. I have seen some odd camera angles occur during action scenes however. I will stated I have not been able to link my paradox game appropriately which may be why i have not experienced sudden crashes or error's. (They may be related to instabilities of online stuff) I have rated the game based on my experiences early into play. The game has brought to the field everything i expected, I was not expecting the sound track to be so fitting, I gave 4 out of 5 stars due to not being able to login and stay logged in, something i am hoping i can rectify later.

There's a lot to like about Battletech. Building up your mercenary company, upgrading your ship, salvaging new Mechs, the list goes on. The campaign is fantastic and any expansion that might be released is an instant buy for me. Both the story and the actual missions were great. It's been a very long time since I've played a strategy game with a campaign I was this invested in. Some of the missions came down to the wire and from watching streams, I know I'm not the only one that happened to. Fiddling with your mechs is fun, too, if you're into that sort of thing. If you don't like trying to find the best loadout for your giant robot, this might not be the game for you. Depending on how you play, you'll get anywhere between 40 and 80+ hours out of a run, well worth the price of admission, if you ask me. Now, the game does have some flaws, but considering everything it gets right and how few games of this genre exist, I am more than willing to forgive them. For one, there's performance. No two ways about it, performance isn't great. Mostly, this concerns load time between missions, but it's still annoying. Then, there's some balance issues. Mechs, weapons and skills are not as diverse as they could be. Some are objectively better than others, which is a bit unfortunate. In contrast to previous Mechwarrior and Mech Commander games, there's even less reasons to bring light mechs and some of the simplifications make certain weapons largely obsolete. Those are minor nitpicks, in the grand scheme of things, though. Still, the game has me making meaningful decisions all the time which is more than can be said of most current games. Do I want more money or a bigger cut of the salvage? Do I want to try and take this enemy mech out leaving it mostly intact so I can salvage it or does it need to die right here, right now and who cares how much it explodes? Do I eject this pilot who's almost dead or does she have to stay and fight? Long story short, I recommend this game.

The game is not perfect (what game is?). There are a few 'issues', but none that I have personally noticed that are game-breaking. Most of the complaints I have read are LARGELY avoidable or fixable (future patch). Unfortunately it may not be so intuitive to the every-day computer game person to make the most of their experience by tweaking some settings. TECHNICAL ISSUES: For example, there are some performance issues. If not using an SSD the load times can be a bit annoying- we're talking console annoying. The game will OCCASIONALLY drop many frames- the instances are very specific though. Turn changes, etc. The stories about cooking GPU's are because people turn on "High Quality UI" and don't cap FPS. The visual difference is negligible and for most not even noticeable, but the performance hit is ridiculously stupid. The visual quality is NOT 2007/8. The environments and mechs are VERY detailed.... but unfortunately difficult to see (zoom)- so it doesn't do itself justice. If you take the opportunity to look closely it's there. I have never lost any saves or had any CTD's. The game has been stable (as can be using Unity). It does get a little 'sluggish' after 5-6 hours of continuous play, but that's it. Restart game. GAME-DESIGN It's a fun game. There's no question. I have never engaged in the tabletop version: I come from a love of Mechwarrior games from the early 90's onwards. I also have a soft spot for tactical games like XCOM, Fallout Tactics, etc. Sure you can't move the camera around during a turn animation. Sometimes the missions are a little 'samey'. But the gameplay (combat) is never-the-less satisfying. Earning money and salvage is gratifying. Story ark: decent. Plus, keeping your own mercenary company running, outfitting your lances, etc, it's addicting, it's fun. If you like Mechwarrior and XCOM, you'll enjoy this. No question. Technical issues (mostly) get patched. Don't be afraid. Try it yourself.

I go by the great, good, bad scale of grades, where great is just a fundamentally great game that has very little flaws and the pros outweigh the cons by a longshot. Good is that it's still an enjoyable game but it has it's flaws that can either turn people on or off, and bad is that pretty much everyone will recognise the pile of garbage that a game can potentially be. This game is Good, with a potential of sliding either into bad, or great in the directions they'll push the game to. With the first update that should drop in June/July, I feel as though they're going to make progress into turning this game into something great, as the turn-based gameplay will have a speedup option, alongside optimizations--as the one major flaw this game suffers at the moment is that you can recognise that this game probably needed an extra month or two to smooth out a lot of things. I feel with the content that BATTLETECH has to offer, at the moment if they keep their hands tight on what they want this game to be, then there is almost an infinite amount of room to expand in a lot of different directions when it comes to DLC and the battletech universe. However going onto gameplay, it's fun, it's basically X-COM minus the overwatch button which is instead replaced by reserving a turn for the next round (which is something I still gotta figure out as they don't do too much explaining). You might need to restart the campaign at least once as it's easy to progress through the story until you realize the handicaps, when a mech is destroyed/crippled in a mission, it can take up to 4 months for both your mech and it's pilot to recooperate while you're only floating on 200,000 credits which are eaten up by monthly debts (which average out early game to be about 100-200k). This means that early game, you can go broke really easily without the game holding your hand telling you what not to do. All n' all, it needs improvements. Good game, with potential to expand into something great.