BATTLETECH

This is BattleTech, but you barely get to look at great mech even when you are Upgrading or Repairing them. Light Mechs are at great disadvantage and basically useless.

The gameplay is solid and customising 'mechs with seemingly illogical weapon loadouts is always fun. What isn't fun is sitting around waiting for the game to allow you to do something, and this game absolutely revels in doing exactly that. This sounds like an odd complaint in a turn-based tactics game, but I'm not talking about the combat. Allow me to explain: Usually you'll only do about two contracts in a star system before moving on to the next. Travelling to another system typically takes 20+ in-game days, each of which takes more than a real-time second. You can't do anything during this time; if you want to check the store, your 'mech bay, 'mech pilots or whatever, time will pause until you're done. There's also some short but unskippable cutscenes every time you approach the jump ship taking you to another system, and when you reach orbit of whichever planet you were heading for, further adding to the amount of time the player spends waiting. There's absolutely no reason for inter-system travel to take this long. The game itself is great but I suspect I'll have spent several hours in total staring at my screen twiddling my thumbs by the time I finish it. I like Hare-brained Schemes' TBT games and the Battletech universe, and this game could've easily been 4, possibly 5 stars to me but the amount of time this game is happy to waste is completely unacceptable.

This game is a piece of trash. It will constantly crash, lag on my 2x 980ti system with a 6700k cpu even on 720p resolution. There is barely any voice acting, dialogue is not animated (chars. stand still, no gun pulling, drinking anim., etc.) The game is laced with gender politics and annoying leftist narrative, forcing a diversity agenda. Combat is terrible. It takes forever even for a turn based game, and half the time there's no other options in terms of strategy/tactics to stand and slug it out with enemies. This is not battletech. This is a cheap gimmick using nostalgia as it's hype source. It's terrible just like WH40K games, it preys on the old fan boys to come back for a half ***ed game that sinks in poor publicity, and sales remain stagnant until the price is dropped. All of the missions are generic, it's just raid here, do this and that because we need to restore our random political group that nobody ever knew about. Seriously, why is this game set in the periphery? It's so boring. It's all about some diverse poor rebels fighting the rich, and the rich are led by a male who happens to be very militant. SUPER CLICHE. Super Trash. Don't buy this.

I played the table top game throughout the 1990s. When I got this, I was looking for something that could emmulate those fun times at the table with miniatures. This game did that in spades. It plays like the board game, but handles all the math and calculations. Add to that nice, though not great, graphics and this is a very fun game! It is turned based, which might turn off some people, but it moves smoothly and keeps you engaged.

Apart from performance issues, the game is quite enjoyable at first. But it doesn't last more than a few hours. There is a large variety of mechs, and the tactics mechanics are interesting. Building your mechs and testing them on the field feels great, until you find some OP Mech/Layout Combos at which point the game drastically changes from untertaining to boring. The Difficulty rating of missions is misleading as 2/5 rated missions can prove difficult while 4/5 rated missions are way too easy. As soon as you get your first Assault, 1-2 missile boats and the called shot mastery, you can steamroll everything without having to use your brain. Most mechs can be OS. You find yourself rushing the main mission because mercenary contracts are too easy/boring. The game could be great, but as for XCOM 2, it would need a Long War overhaul to unlock its real potential.