BATTLETECH

My mid-range system runs the game fine, no crashes so far (about 1/2way through the game). I haven't heard much about crashing from other players, but they're common enough that the devs are working on a patch. The story missions don't get in your way, and I've heard that ignoring them causes you to lose the story, but can keep playing. The mech lab allows you to fiddle with your mech's weapons, parts get blown off (but crits don't have much effect outside of occasional ammo explosions), and salvage is your friend. Pilots and mechs get beat up enough that you have to take lesser spares into battle or worry about running out of money, which manages to be tight throughout most of the game. Even the sometimes extreme rolls from tabletop make a showing (bad rolls can mean a mech gets one-shot, or the mech you wanted to salvage gets scrapped). There are a few abstractions to make it friendlier to new players, and a few are weird. Instead of the piles of arms, legs, heads, etc. of different types, you get generic parts. 3 parts gets you a mech. Weird, but it works ok. No internals means no gyro hits, no engine hits, not even a penalty for using the critted limb.

Getting into a mission on the campaign is too easy...it makes the worst kind of one-more-turn syndrome that it's ruining my sleep life. The campaign balance seems really good. I feel stressed often, but never feel like I can't think my way out of a problem. Mission variety is typical for a Batletech game, escort, assualt, defend. There's no LAN multiplayer at this point, which is a huge flaw in the game. Hopefully at some point I can skirmish against my kid, which is what I bought the game for.

So for the most part I have enjoyed the game, the graphics are good, the mech modeling is good and have yet to have any crashes of glitches that ive seen other people mention. Would be nice to customize the mechs more. The travel between systems is not very streamlined. Not sure what they were thinking when they dont give you a fast forward button on the day timer. Do we really need to wait for the ship to go to the jump ship and then jump and then continue the travel to the planet. This part wasnt well thought out. Ive played through several campaign missions and the one thing that sticks out in my mind is the WTF moments in the missions. If you dont make the right decision in the first 1 to 3 turns in the game you might as well reload and restart the mission. Also, melee attack are ridicoulously OP. Enemy vehicles can absorb amazing amounts of damage in one mission and then get one shot the next mission with the same amount of armor. The AI almost never misses on called shots when your mech is knocked down. Lets not forget the turrets that can hit you from across the map when your mech is behind mountains, out of line of sight with uncanny accuracy. I just rage quit my mission this morning due to turrets on the oppisite side of the map shredding two heavy mechs that were behind a mountain with no line of sight. LOL Lets hope they have more additional content with lots of improvements. This game has lots of potential, just needs more spit and polish.

For me, gameplay would be great, but loading times... For the first time it's barely OK, dozen of seconds to show list of saves to load. But when you select "Load game" from battle... well, loading of saves list is longer than loading of the game itself! Loading times is awful, I have game installed on an SSD, i7, GTX970, 16 Gb of RAM, and still I am waiting for something HUGE to be loaded and processed. Harebrained Schemes, what is it? ;)

Battletech surely knows how to be a really good game: it is difficult, engaging, and it's art is beautiful. During my experience I have found deep tactical battles, especially the campaign ones, that are very well written and directed and often pose a real challenge to the player. As somewhat bad aspects, the filler missions as mercenary job could have used some more diversity, and enemy AI sometimes feels a bit "green", as it doesn't know how to best use particular roles that don't put combat as their main focus (scouts for example), but probably these aspects will be improved by updates to the game during time. By the way, the game as it is is still very enjoyable, and it's evident the amount of time and passion developers put in it. Even though I heard about performance problems at launch, I've played since day one without a crash and with optimal performance. Overall, 8.5/10, but future updates can improve this rating even more.