BATTLETECH

I'm not very far into the campaign, so perhaps much of the laudation this game has received is more visible later in the game, but so far, I'm not impressed. The setup seems to be a fairly standard squad-based tactics game in which a handful of units are controlled in battles and the overworld map can be navigated between battles. There doesn't seem to be much innovation here. I'm guessing it's the setting which attracts the most amount of fans -- giant cybernetic machines with big guns. It does feel quite puerile, and sadly, the writing of the "campaign" is absolutely abysmal (although the voice acting does ok). It's so cringeworthy it's put me off a bit. What's odd is that the main appeal of this game -- commanding these giant metal beasts of little-boy yearning -- feels far off, because they appear to be just little tiny figures in an otherwise very bland map. The scale does not feel daunting. The game was written in Unity, which means performance is fairly ok but will still make your machine run hot. The controls are clunkly and slow, with much reliance on mouse-use and additional clicks just to confirm. I've had to restart once because of a crash, and apparently my game was not saved either; since you cannot save from within a mission, at least during the scripted campaign, that means backtracking all the way back through the drivel. I'm hoping the later battles will be worth it.

I haven't played very far into the game (Only just got passed the tutorial), so I can't comment on the narrative. What I have seen isn't too bad. Voice acting in cutscenes seems fantastic, but the in game voice acting has fallen a bit flat so far (that said, I am only one mission in). Action camera REALLY slows gameplay down to the point that it becomes tedious (I started reading a book while I was playing). The real issue I have, however, is the load the game puts on the GPU. I started the game, and immediately noticed that it was struggling to play it. It took quite a while to load the main menu, and loading times for the missions themselves are also quite tedious. This became a concern when I decided to check my memory to see if there was an issue. To my surprise however, it wasn't the memory that was an issue, but my GPU. The load this game put on it was a constant 100%. And for those who might wonder, my hardware is NOT the issue. I've read multiple reports that it's a result of memory leaks built into the Unity engine (one reason I found was because there is no frame-rate cap). Regardless, I would potentially advise against purchasing the game until they have fixed this issue.

I've playtested Alpha builds of games more stable that this game, which frankly doesn't even appear to be Beta test ready. . What little i've played has been good. Unfortunately menus lag, load screens hang, save games corrupt, UI crashes, and load times are over a minute most of the time. I'm on a i5 4760 /w 970 GTX and 24gb RAM. it takes 2-3 attempts just to start the game until you can get to the start options. Will revisit my review in 3-6 mos thime when they've patched this wretched mess.

Cannot review as game crashes before I have a chance to play - I can only see an Intro. Probably because I firewalled it. But as I can see from other reviews - for a good reason.

Doesn't work. The game crashes after the tutorial. Worthless. Money wasted... I'll never buy a Harebrained Schemes game again.