BATTLETECH

I've been playing this game for 6 hours and so far it is great. This is probably a medium for me on the launch bug scale but I have faith that these will be fixed soon. I personally have not run into any bugs but have been snooping on forums. This is a game for people who like chess over checkers. I love the lore and the setting. The mechs are true to specs and other earlier battletech games from the 90s. Tactical decisions carry extreme weight, as an alpha strike can easily cripple one of your mechs. I blinked and 4 hours had gone by so plan time accordingly.

Fist off the bat, one can tell the team tries to add in the whole "social justice" narrative. They have preferred pronouns at character creation, as well as going on about "diversity" in the descriptions of houses. I hear enough of this nonsense in real life - don't want it in games. That aside the technical faults are terrible. The game is not optimised, and runs terribly even with a GTX 1080Ti with long loading times and poor in-game performance. They chose the Unity Engine to build the game with (would not be my first choice, but that's personal preference). The texturing is inconsistent and terrible. Even on the highest settings some of the rocks looks like a blurred mess. The graphics are 2006 standard. There are numerous bugs, like when being zoomed all the way in to look at one's Mech, not being able to move the camera left, without first pressing "w" to move it up. The game crashes. Allot it seems. It froze/crashed 3 times in a row when I tried to finish the tutorial and just got a screen with a ship floating and planet in the background, so couldn't even really play the game properly. The animations aren't great, but okay. They have modelled 'Mechs off the MWO 'Mechs, which is fine, but then they have some things which are non consistent at all with Battletech, such as damage output of some weapons as well as hardpoints. The game also crashed every time when attempting to quit to the main menu or desktop. There are also finnicky things, like not having a drag-box to select your 'Mechs or targets with, making it harder to just play the game. All of these things (and more, I have limited characters to type with here), make me give the game 1 start. I really wanted to like this, being a MWO player and loving the real tabletop Battletech game, as well as older Mechwarrior titles. These problems can be fixed (well, not the infetion with the SJW brain virus however) with subsequent patches. Might be better when/if fixed, but for now, 1 star.

I could really enjoy playing this game. It could've been one of my favourites. The gameplay is solid and the lore is fantastic... But it's broken. It's completely unstable. It just crashes, again, and again, no matter what I try. It's a good thing that it auto-saves after every battle, because you will need to reload the game a lot. Maybe it's something to do with my setup (AMD), but it's not like I have an extremely unusual system, and the onus is really on developers to get their sh#t together and make programs that work on the gamut of PC hardware.

I pre-ordered this game for the full price, only to have it have a 10% price reduction on release. This goes a long way to convince me to not pre-buy anything on GOG (on steam, the game remains at full price at the time of writing). As for the game itself, it's a beautiful mix of tactics and strategy; satisfying tactical brawls with mechs on the ground, and proper mechwarrior musical hardpoints in space. While there are some compromises made for a 'smoother' gameplay (such as the maximum of 4 controllable mechs), the game is very satisfying and fun. In short: lots of tactical choices, informative UI, deep 'mech customisation (the same depth as Mechwarrior or Mechcommander) + the added logistical layer of trying to earn money, buy parts, assemble/sell/buy mechs, pay your mechwarriors, and settle crew disputes by drinking the last drop of coffee on the ship. As much as I'd like to fault the game for the price drop, that's GOG's fault. So the game gets a full 5/5: amazing game + moderare launch bugs. I'd advise you get it if you enjoy the genre. With the -10%, I wish I would've bought it now!

This is everything I was hoping for. I bought this for the single player campaign and it hasn't disappointed in the slightest. It has everything you would want from crew and mech selection, training and refitting, salvage and mission selection. The game is running flawlessly (Win 10, 1080, SSD), loads quickly, no crashes, but I understand this could be due to luck. Given how flaky many AAA games have been for me recently, this game is exceptional in it's stability. The graphics convey the feel of the tabletop well enough, but the colour palette is rather bland. Texture quality is also a little less than I would have hoped for a modern game, but mechs look like mechs, pew pews are pewie and much fun is had. The management UI and the graphics here are excellent and the artwork in general throughout the game is very immersive. I personally think anyone rating a game as good as this as anything less than a 3 purely due to DRM needs to realise the impact they are having on developers. This is not an issue which deserves a one star rating, unless the thought of using Steam, Origin or Uplay drives you to gnaw on your keyword in fury. If that is the case, get help. I would have rated the game 4.5 based on my feeling that the planet graphics should have been better, but I'm unwilling to drop it to a 4, so it gets a 5.