BATTLETECH

The core game loop is very well executed. Going into combat with your lance of mechs is a lot of fun mainly due to the excellent mechanics and UI. The prospect of winning all that salvage to customize your 'mechs or even add new 'mechs to your roster makes it addictive. Travelling around the starmap as you please and allowing you to choose your missions as you please (in career mode) gives you enough agency to make it feel like a true open world game. You decide. There's hardly any story in career mode but that would only reduce that freedom (and the 100hr campaign is there to cater to those players). All this is severely hampered by the developer's bad exception handling decisions. You might have noticed people here complaining about inexplicably long loading and action times. I experience those too. The cause of these problems? For some reason - Maybe due to Unity? Maybe due to release pressure? Maybe due to laziness? maybe due to incompetence (but I doubt that's the case)? - the developer decided to launch a parallel process named "UnityCrashHandler64" with the main game proces every time you start the game. Whenever the game throws an unhandled exception (but why would you allow exceptions to go unhandled in the first place?!) it becomes non-responsive (the task Manager clearly shows 'not responding'), then that silly parallel proces has to handle the exception and then manage the game proces to get it running again... These are extremely expensive operations for a computer. Even a very strong computer will lose seconds whenever this happens, and it happens A LOT... The coders clearly started leaning into this error handling proces and the code is full of unhandled exceptions that make the game non-responsive until the parallel proces gets it moving again... This is very aggravating and chases many people away from the game. It drops the rating, causes scathing reviews, etc... For what is essentially a very fun game. It's a crying shame.

Fantastic game and it is very challenging. I love the turn based tactical approach to this game, and it will punish you for making a mistake, for example I decided to not move one of my mechs which meant no evasion is on that mech, the opposition focus fired on that mech, luckily the worse that happened was injury to my pilot. The game has a lot of depth to it. From running a mercenary business and making sure you don't go bankrupt, and having enough mercenaries in your crew and enough mechs in your bay to make sure you always have what you need when doing a mission with as little downtime as possible, cause time is money. There are even random events that happen when you are at your ship, events that can effect various things like how long it takes to repair, or how long it takes for your mercenaries to recover from injury, how often you can use certain abilities when on missions, and even the price of stuff. You get to negotiate your contracts, balancing out money, salvage, and reputation, you decide what you want/need the most. The combat is a lot of fun. You take turns through phases of a round and depending on weight class it puts your mech in a certain phase of a round, so you have to keep that in mind with your tactics

I really like turn based strategy like XCOM, so this game didn't disappoint me. Also I like the Battletech universe in general so this game is right up my alley. I think the main campaign is pretty good, the story is okay and the various fights better. You can't just walk in a straight line, positioning etc is very important. Can you sprint around a terrain feature to flank your opponent? Maybe use a jump capable Mech to get on to of a hill? Are you in cover? Etc. Also the initiative plays a huge role. Small mechs have less firepower and armor, but higher initiative. That means you can position yourself and "wait out" bigger mechs to then give them a double whammy, preferably from behind. Nothing is more satisfactory than to beat a big scary mech with a couple of small ones, but it can be done. Sure it had a rocky release with some performance problems, after a couple of patches though the game was more than okay. HBS is a small studio, they can't really support a huge triple-A title. A good move on their part to make a deal with Paradox Interactive to get help with support for the game. The Career mode added in the 1.3 patch was much appreciated. Gives you something to do after playing the campaign, that is if you don't also enjoy playing skirmish with other humans. Late game gives you tons of options how to train your mechwarriors and customize your mechs. With the right equipment, a usually pretty tame mech can become a nightmare, especially with the right pilot in the cockpit.

The base campaign is fun and you can choose to do side missions to extend the game or just focus on completeing the story missions. I didn't find it compelling enough to do vanilla playthoughs of the career mode. (career is just like the campaign minus story) However playing with the roguetech mod adds much more depth - strongly recomended if you play again after the story.

First of all I am a fan of the Battletech universe since 1990 and have played all PC games (except the online Mechwarrior). As a tabletop player I especially enjoyed a programm on Amiga and PC that was called Mechforce as it was round based and true to the tabletop variant. I was overjoyed when I heard that a round based version would be released and immediately bought it without thinking twice. That was a big mistake! Gameplay: Yes, visually it's nicely done but the game lacks tactical depth (you can not drop ammo, target specific locations, decide to use an arm or a leg for a melee attack etc.). Gameplay is drawn out and animations take forever. Still, I could enjoy this if not for the main problem: I quit the game yesterday after saving and when I wanted to start now I had to find out that my savegame was gone. Loading was greyed out. Clicking continue campaign didn't yield any result and starting a new campaign ended in a loading screen and stuck there. Oh ,there is no Ultrawide support fort the game either (It's 2018 guys). Essentially I paid 39,99€ (btw. the price has already dropped to 35,99€ so that's what you get for being an early bird...) for a game that isn't really working and if you check the forum at harebraines schemes this isn't a single case on the contrary or check Steam for comparison. At the moment there is only one sensible thing to do regarding this game: DO NOT BUY!!!