BATTLETECH

This is a game for tactics players. Players who understand that probabilities as listed mean you'll still have salvos that get 0/20 hits, and sometimes you'll get 20/20, and that survivor bias means you'll remember every time it goes badly for you, and every time it goes good for the enemy, but not vice versa. Difficulty of Story missions is not really on par with the difficulty scale for generated mission of the same "difficulty". Other than that, If you want to be good at this game at all, you have to be a good "deck builder". Customizing mechs is the heart and soul of this game, and if you are bad at it or don't do it, you'll have no chance in the combat game loop. Front line mechs need to be refit with max armor, other mechs still need more than what they are given, and glass cannon build will indeed shatter like glass. Missions are abouut endurance, not overwhelming aggro (unless you're doing missions significantly below your level). I thought the campaign was pretty good for a 60 hour or so run and played throughit probably 3 or 4 times over the years, but the rest of that time was almost 1000 hours of play with mods, and the modding scene for this game is absolutely out of this world. Even if the base game is not quite to you liking, there is 100% a mod or tweak somewhere to make you experience better. So, TL;DR, This game is all baout the customization, both in game and out (i.e. mods). If you're not into that, this game is probably mediocre at best for you. Also you definitely want all the dlc (season pass), but get it on sale because it goes on sale regularly withh all the dlc for less than what the base game usually goes for.

I really wanted to love Battletech. It's a really interesting universe and the game seems to have nailed the actual aesthetic of giant robots punching each other. Unfortunately that's all it does; it's a shame that the execution of the actual game is so poor. A thread-bare boring storyline, a design that loves to waste your time, lack of any sensible tutorial, badly explained mechanics, poorly thought-through UX and 'story' mission design pulled straight from some sadistic DM's handbook. It... just isn't that fun. I kept playing after the first few priority missions, hoping the game would pick up, become interesting. It doesn't. It's just the same grind, over, and over, and over. Watching endless loops of your ship travelling, waiting for mechwarriors in the medbay, incredibly long loading screens - paint drying is giving the game good competition at times. When you're finally in the game proper, you'll have seen the entire mission range of possibilities in perhaps eight hours. Expect to see it repeated, a great deal. Aside from the occasional amusing soundbite from one of the mechwarriors (Glitch I'm looking at you), the game feels completely soulless. Even the maps seem built to drain your soul with monochrome planet surfaces that are endless seas of red, or grey, or white. Design feels like a design-by-committee mess. It can't decide if it wants to be a story-driven RPG, a roguelike, a top-down strategy game, or a mobile port cow-clicker. That this is from the same developers that created Shadowrun: Hong Kong beggars belief. I don't know if they simply tried to take on too much, or whether they just threw so many game elements in they figured 'something here must appeal to everyone' but the game sorely needed greater focus. The game is not without its merits. I suspect if you just want to play some skirmishes and see some mechs shoot each other, it's got a lot going for it. It's just there's little beyond that.

I would like to add anything positive to the current Reviews of the Game but i sadly can't. After encountering countless bugs in my current thirty-three hours long Playthrough of this technical digital mess that other Developers wouldn't even consider to call an Alpha/Beta Build or even considered it to be finished the Game finally decided that it can't load up any longer any of my Save Files that i had from my last play five months ago. So besides from Bugs left and right, Loading Times ahead of missions and during missions from hell even on SSD/NVME Drives and broken Saves i came to the final conclusion that it's not me who has an issue with the Game but that the Game is still after more then twenty months a masterpiece of unfinished digital art. I still wish Harebrained Schemes a bright future with those kind of Games and their Playerbase the best but since i only have one life and don't want to waste with their Games even more of my time that i have left i'm done with them and leaving this Review as a reminder if i will be ever stupid enough to believe that i should give one of their Games another try.

I am glad I waited for a sale to try this game, or I'd have been even more disappointed than I am now. I've played the Mechwarrior, Mechcommander, and Battletech games (including tabletop with miniatures) since Crescent Hawk's Inception, and this rendition appears, even after all of the bug-fixes, to be the worst of the lot. I actually am a fan of turn-based tactical games, so I thought this one would be a joy. As I was downloading the files, I noticed there was no manual, so I thought "The game must be pretty intuitive to learn. Kewl!" Maybe I expected too much. Gameplay is slow, with a lot of lag time spent waiting for things to load, the interface is poor (and poorly explained), and the game has little or no support from the developers. I find myself spending more time searching online for second and third party advice to learn how to navigate a game, than actually playing the game. The developers should have invested some resources in creating, at the very least, a tutorial manual. On the plus side, I thought the game was visually pleasing. I was so disappointed and frustrated with this package, that I went back to the earlier games, with simpler graphics, and have begun playing them again. With great satisfaction.

Everything anyone has said about performance issues, over long loading times and fatal crashes is true and then some. I've spent all day failing to get through the opening missions. Litte scripted events randomly cause the game to have a total anurism. Sometimes. Sometimes the same scripted events are fine not even a hint of trouble, other times the game shudders to a frame by frame halt until ultimately freezing unrecoverably. And why? Just because the map scrolled a bit to look at nothing much happening. Then it's back to an extended load to load an opening made of what should be system resource cheap "animation" then too long to a menu, then too long to load your campaign/map then oops, straight back into a minor scripted event that scrolls the map slightly, cross your fingers, this is ambitious stuff! Yeah. I want to like this, I can't even say the game has even given me a chance to figure out if I do. Oh and the "tutorial"/opening missions teach you basically nothing whatsoever. Except for map scrolling. That's big deal stuff clearly. And character/campaign creation appears to have at least one step with only one option and another step where the choice is either meaningless or does completley secret things. I would discus more but again thats about all a day with this thing has managed to produce.