BATTLETECH - Mercenary Collection

First of all, the gameplay: Graphics are good enough, you won't hurt your eyes with this. Performance is okay (Max settings with 3600X / 1070 / 64Gb), loading times can be optimised as I run it on a HDD, not a SSD or M2 NVMe. What else to say about the gameplay. It is turn based. The story has traces of RPG elements, aswell as the surrounding world. There are differing planets with their own biomes or mixes of different biomes where you finish contracts on, like jungles, deserts, highlands and moon biomes. Tacticwise, that means you need to handle different surface conditions, like the lunar biome, where the lack of atmosphere makes sinking heat extremely difficult. Jungle biomes will give you increased heat sinking capabilities aswell as flora and fauna which give cover to your mechs. Coming to the contracts, there is a handful with different objectives and side objectives, so the game doesn't get repetitive right from the beginning and completing side objectives gives a bonus on income you'd get for succesful completion. While choosing a contract you want to do for a faction, you can choose between, payment, mechparts and reputation, while increasing one will decrease the other two. Speaking of factions, there are about 9 factions, each with their alliances and foes. Completing contracts for factions will increase your reputation with them and you gain higher rewarding contracts which are also more difficult. Becoming ally of a faction grants you access to their faction store with specialized gear and mechs. Arguably the pirates offer the best 'faction store', the blackmarket. The Campaign: I'd advise to play through this the first run you play this game. It is fairly easy and you get cash thrown at you after a somewhat tough start. Your mechwarriors at the start are weak with low abilities and will often miss shots, but that gets better fast as you progress. The abilities are interesting and balanced and you could adjust your mechs to your mechwarriors abilities

This game would have been an easy 5 stars were it not for persistent technical issues that occasionally detract from the fun. I'll begin with the positives: - Interesting turn-based combat system with a heavy emphasis on tactics and adaptation to terrain, climate, weather, enemy force composition and tactics - Extensive variety of fully customizable mechs - Hire, train, and develop a cadre of mechwarriors to excel in specific combat roles (or as generalists) - Setting rich with lore and a strong sense of history in a fully explorable fictional galaxy - Dramatic campaign and open world modes - Excellent mod support, including several outstanding total conversions - Multiplayer skirmish mode (for those who want it) And for the negatives: - Memory leak causes long load times in late game, no matter how powerful the system - Occasional crashes mar the experience Despite the technical issues, I was enthralled by the world, the lore, the battlemechs, and the combat. Highly recommended!

First off, I haven't had that much fun in a long time! I am a fan of Battletech since Mechwarrior 2, I prefer the action games actually. My expectations were quite low when I picked up the Mercenary Collection on sale. Now I am over 50h in and I love the game so far. In my opinion the progression is quite balanced, you start off which a small ship and a few mechs, slowly improving your squad, ship and mechs. Between the missions you are busy managing and investing the money you just earned in new gear. But the tactical side is the most fun, you can try different approaches with different mechs, e.g. a fast scout mech with jump jets as a spotter finding targets for a long range rocket launcher mech outside of enemies attack radius, or use some heavy brawlers for close combat with heavy armor. Small mechs can move faster, which makes them hard to hit, this way they have even a chance against some heavy mechs, given they stay out of melee radius. There are many decision you have to make during combat, such as "should I eject my pilot in the heavy damaged mech or do I need him to support my lance, risking his death" or "should I attack the small mechs first, killing the quickly and deal with the heavy mechs later or is it better to neutralize the most deadly weapons of the heavy mechs first". Also, I like the story and the whole setting, but do not expect something out of the ordinary. There are some annoyances as well, which don't bother me at all, but just so you know: long loading times, some repetitive missions, no full voiceover, the camera placement is sometimes not optimal.

I bought this on a whim during a good sale a while back and was surprised by just how much I enjoyed it. I'm not much of a Battletech/Mechwarrior fan but I'm aware enough of the series to have an inkling of what it would be about and gave it a go based on that and i was not disappointed! For those unaware, the game is turn based and largely sandbox (in terms of where you can go, and what you can do between story missions, which you can take on whenever you wish) and features a bit of RNG when it comes to enemy weapon hits which can feel pretty brutal at times but not unfair, since you can sometimes pull off those super lucky head shots yourself sometimes. Between combat, you can change weapon loadouts, upgrade your ship and that kind of stuff. During an actual mission, the gameplay can be great fun, once you get your head around how things work (it isn't explained in great detail, which is a minor flaw). loading into the mission, even on SSD is surprisingly slow.. which feels odd in this day and age. Combat flows well and i don't think i ever had a crash. The story is.. well.. it's there - it's not some space epic but it's not awful either - it's just fairly plain and easy to see coming. Replayability is fairly limited unless you want to choose to make up your own goals to pursue Overall, with all the DLC included in the Mercenary Pack, and on sale, this was an excellent deal and well worth the money. Definitely don't pay the full price though - it's a good game, but you won't be telling your grand kids about it. That said, it's still definitely worth your time!

... and of course UNITY! Some may remember there was an RTS based equivalent for this title in '98 called MechCommander. MechCommander did everything right what Battletech did wrong. Turn based is not a bad thing in general but this title does it in an abstrusive annoying way. 1. The first thing you do after a couple of missions is disable every automatic camera focus because it is annoying to have the game mess with your controls constantly. 2. The second feature you disable is the cinematics. The camera logic is so stupid, it does move itself inside the terrain, behind buildings, vegetation etc. This makes you realize how bad the visuals actually are. 3. The amount of bugs found in this title, especially at a base price of 90€ is unacceptable. Mission 3 shows you tutorial window overlays at specific turn numbers. The overlays share their mouse events with the running game, so you click on "next" and "close" on the overlay and at the same time one of your mechs recognizes this as commands for this round. You subsequently restart the mission yourself. 4. The game is Unity-based which is a guarantee for low quality games and privacy issues. There is no opt out option found to disable unity's user tracking feature, so selling this title in EU violates GDPR. To sum it up, don't buy this title, stick to the old Mech Commander.