BATTLETECH

This is brutal. I just spent half an hour on the last leg of an escort mission watching the little allied APCs take 45 seconds each to take their move. Turn after turn after turn. It's not like anything was going on. It was out of combat. They had a simple task, drive from point A to point B. This is after, incidentally, disabling animations, upping the speed 5x, and doing all the fixes on reddit. Often the in-combat AI takes even longer at range but just to show that it can do better, in face to face combat the AI will often (but not always) be as fast as it should be. Is this a Paradox thing? I had the same issue with Age of Wonder 3. Fantastic, deep, and rewarding gameplay marred by glacially slow AI. How did this even clear playtesting and patching? The slow animations, those make sense - I like that the Battlemechs have some weight to them. But lagging on every single AI movement... It undermines what is, on all other fronts, a fantastic strategy game. Battletech like a Trese Brothers' game on steroids. It has just the right amount of roguelike elements to keep it fresh and replayable, backed up with deep and meaningful mechanics. All of this grounded in the rich lore of the Battletech setting. This game was clearly made by people who appreciate the decades of source material. The load times are abysmal but I'm willing to give that a pass. Customize the mechs. Level-up your pilots. Salvage the coolest enemy unit. Try out all kinds of crazy set-ups and hijinks. It's very rewarding. The sub-systems could use a few quality of life improvements - a lot of them waste 20 seconds of your life unnecessarily - but it's forgivable. Of course, it's not so easy to forgive each AI unit deciding to take twenty to thirty times as long as the player to take their turn. This really is a good game. Maybe even great if you're a Battletech fan like me. It really is. But it's hard to recommend it. There's no excuse for AI this laggy on anything approaching a modern PC.

It feels I have played different game than most positive reviewers. I have been Battletech player since 1989. So I have waited game based on year 3025 a very long time but: Pros: -based on Battletech -sensors (blib, blib, is so cute!) Cons (in random order): - tons of graphical glithes (mechs fall in knee deep to hills and so on) - very few mech movement / falling / damage etc. animations - "action" camera makes the game slow as hell and doesn´t regognize well what is between camera and target --> had to turn it off - has small graphical freezes and lags even in low settings (i7-6400k/GTX1050ti) --> graphical optimatization is bad? - narrative: missions has spoken and non spoken lines - it is bit distracting in game - off mission gameplay feels to be glued on after battlesystem was done and it jumps between 2d and 3d mode with out logic -- huge neg: CTD:s ----> game save system is manual so you lose everything if you have not saved - AI seems to be focusing on player movement and 'mechs in bad shape, easy to flank and get free back shot when 'mechs turn to follow moving light 'mech (risk to be repetitive), AI seems to be confused to moving in complex terrain - 'Mechs look cloned from further - character desing is also cloned: characters look same, no blond hair(?!)... - you need Paradox account to multiplayer and DLC:s I hope "they" will keep updating the core mechanics and I could give this game better review?

45 minutes through a tough mission... I won the day, but the game crashed right on the debriefing screen. One would think that this kind of games automatically save every end of turn, but apparently this is not the case. I feel like going back to 1997.

As a longtime Battletech/Mechwarrior fan, subjectively speaking I adore this game. The marriage between turn based strategy and business management forms an appealing gameplay loop as you continually better your tactics, equipment and pilots. It's not hugely original but it works. Visuals aren't exactly AAA, but the mechs look, sound and feel the part, exuding all the heft and power you'd hope a walking death machine would. Honestly, the time just flies by while I'm playing. That is when things work as intended, which is where my disclaimer comes in. Why four stars instead of five? Sadly, there are few caveats to the praise which new buyers should be aware of. One of these points has been resolved the rest are ongoing problems that while relatively minor do detract: - The glitches and performance: On launch the game was VERY buggy and even a year on I still had gameplay freezes, bizarre framerate issues and hard crashes. Thankfully this area of the game has been vastly improved in recent months. I haven't had a serious problem in a while, so fingers crossed things should be stable now. - Loading times: This may vary from user to user, but for me at least this are unusually long. It’s not so much a problem initially, but as time goes on, they really begin to make the pace of the game drag. I would find myself getting up to do something else while waiting for the game to load a mech drop. - The DLC model: While I’m pleased the game has been getting these addons, they are extremely overpriced for what you get (e.g. a few mechs, a new terrain type and some basic addon missions called flashpoints). Don’t follow my example and buy them full price, wait for a 50% off sale at the very least to get your money’s worth. All in all, this an enjoyable but flawed game, that should hold a particularly strong appeal to Battletech veterans. It’s a rough diamond, but short of firing up Mechcommander 2 it’s the best bet for fans of the setting right now.

The story is a simplistic tale about punishing a usurper who has taken over a throne in a coup, and I never much cared about the outcome. Missions are repetitive. Most of the time, the most viable strategy is to pack most of your squad to the gills with a high-DPS short-range weapons. Then, camp behind an obstacle and take out the bad guys as they come into view one by one. It's advisable to outfit one of your squad with multiple LRMs, so that you can counter mechs indirectly targeting you and/or knock high-threat targets, which makes them easy to finish off. Any other strategy is sub-optimal on almost all of the maps. There are a bunch of overpriced DLCs, for those who enjoy being fleeced. Given the production values and general lack of content, it's worth buying in a sale only.