BATTLETECH

This is unplayable on 21:9 Ultrawide monitors. Mainly the UI does not scale properly to utilize the aspect ratio, let alone take advantage of it. Buttons will overlay on top of others or be missing from the screen entirely. If Ultrawide support is important to you, you'll want to skip this title for now. Wish list it for a sale and come back when it's worthy of playing with 16:9 black bars, or if by some miracle the devs push a patch. Do not hold your breath for that however, as our Ultrawide concerns were clearly ignored during the beta period.

I've run into almost zero bugs and the game runs ok on my pc, so I don't need to complain about performance. However, even at its best, the game has unbearbably slow cutscenes and animations. Add a completely linear story that tells you the ending before you even begin playing, and you have a recipe for stale gameplay. Did I mention the cookie-cutter token diversity cast? SJW pipedreams standing in the way of immersion. Once you get heavy mechs, mediums are obsolete, and you will probably never have a reason to use a light mech at all. Side missions are extremely repetitive, and there's no sense of exploration or much advancement outside of the main story. On the upside, the combat can be satisfying and it's fun to test out different weapon configurations on your mechs.

Like many said, it's a disappointment. I have backed the development and game is luckluster. It has many terrible things. The story is meh and inspiring, the game mechanics are halfway done and performance issues left and right. Let's start with game mechanics. There's only 3 types of gameplay, destroy, capture and escort. It might be serviceable if game story was great but no such thing here. The map could have been dynamic, with branching storylines, instead you are locked into one linear gameplay with no sense of achievement once you are finished. The randomly generated missions are boring. You can't sit down and play for hours, you get bored, tired of watching same animation play out. Story doesn't make sense sometimes and uninspiring/generic. Your comrades have no personality, they're there just because. Pilots are unfinished, have bunch of quirks in profile that does nothing Bugs are biggest issues in the game, leading to crashing and constant reloading from last save. And I'm not even mentioning the blatant western politics showed into the game. just because one of their dev is LARPing as a woman.

I was going to write a review that is positive and gave 4 stars. Yeah there are issues, yeah the load times are hefty, yeah the save games disappear (but there is a fix, just reload apparently).... but then my save games disappeared. Not all mind you, the ones where I completed the mission successfully, some injuries but no one dead, and kept was the one where I'd failed. Now don't get me wrong, this is the first mission where you strike out post tutorial, and re-doing it, I'm confident I can do better still (now that I know there is a turret generator in the last fight), but I think I will wait for the fix promised for later in May to resolve these issues properly. So, with one mission under my belt, twice, what can I say about the game. Well, the game so far is excellent, just what I wanted, and there were some negative reviews that the action camera, that occasionally zooms in on the fight / mech that's taking its turn, is a bit buggy and quite boring, and ... it's not. I know what they mean, but this isn't Space Hulk, this is quite well implemented, and this was the only criticism that worried me. But I have another: the colour scheme / the graphics / the highlighting of targets: It's a bit ... well terrible. As you move your mech firing solutions are displayed ... except when they are not. Basically you move to location X, you can attack these targets, seems fair, and there are some gotchas like LRM (Long Range Missles, I'm guessing) don't hit point blank, but why does it not tell me about the turret generator? I had laser, melee and SRM firing solutions, and it wouldn't tell me there was a target there. I literlly stood next to it. Also, sometimes it tells you that there is a firing solution, but then it does not let you select the target. Not a hint why that thing it tells you, you should attack at some point can't be attacked now. Graphics ... well it keeps switching me back to high. It is all a bit brown so far and FPS are fine (for a turn based game), but i hope there will be more variety later on. I'm on Intel 7th gen, which I believe is an Intel 620HD and its fine. Still, fix the save games, and explain why some targets can't be targetted. Lots of potential, and i look forward to playing this for real.

Controls are spotty and the GUI is poor. Feels like your fighting against them while you are playing.