BATTLETECH - Digital Deluxe Edition

First thing about this game, the controls and a little janky. They're at least usable but they're not great. Second, the ground combat is bad. It shares almost all of the same problems that the FraXcom series has: -Cover means nothing unless you're right in it. Enemies shoot through a forest with perfect accuracy, but take one step in and suddenly you take 40% less damage despite there being FEWER trees between you and them. -There is no collision detection or real firing calculations. You can walk and shoot right through your own friendly mechs making decision on where to go a lot less meaningful. Range makes almost no difference too, giving you even fewer meaningful decisions to make. -The move/shoot system is nothing but tedious and uninteresting. You gain dodge for moving and there is zero downside to moving(you can't fire extra shots or anything with that move time) so if you want to play effectively you need to move the maximum you can every time which is incredibly tedious and doesn't even make sense. -In what mech game have you ever seen mechs taking turns running behind eachother and shooting eachother in the back? The purchasing of supplies is just messed up too. You buy mechs in parts of three so you end up buying one part in one system because that's all they have, then hope the next two systems you go to each have a part of that mech you just purchased. Why do you have to gamble instead of just being able to buy a complete mech? The game is also optimised like complete trash. I have only 8gigs of ram, but how a game that is this simple and looks as old as it does eats all of my ram and crashes because it runs out of memory is just terrible. I wanted to like this game, I love mech games.....but it's so dumbed down and full of nonsense and performance issues and general jankyness that I just couldn't hack more than five missions. Even for 15 dollars it would be too expensive and for 60 for the shell and then paradox's usual 300 dollars of DLC? No thx

I've backed the game on KS, because I'm a fan of the games MechCommander 1.2 and MechWarrior, and as the creator of the Battletech universe and the tabletop game participated in the development, I thought the game would be a success. During the beta test in one MP match, I faced a rival who had Victor, Trebuchet, Urbanmech and someone else, at that time there was an Angel of Death skill (JJ buff), and Victor with this skill and Trebuchet just carried my detachment, and I was already thinking about surrendering, but a successful shot of my Orion that hit Victor's head broke the situation and in the end I won the battle, left with the only Mech - that's what a real Battletech means. I waited a long time for the game to exit the development, and when I installed it I lost myself in the campaign for 6 hours in a row until late at night, thinking of one more contract and turning it off ... At the same time, in the second mission, the Mech of the main character and himself almost were lost, because I underestimated OpFor in the beginning, thinking there are no worthy opponents - it took 2 months of ingame time to recover - hardcore

I was excited at first and expected a lot more from this game. Even after the first couple of days playing, I was hopeful. But I became disappointed as I kept playing. The gameplay was solid. That cannot be denied. Maybe they could have gave NAV points phonetic letters instead of crosshairs, to make it easier to specify different objectives. A lot of things made this game painful. The music was terrible. It's that same generic chanting or humming that everything seems to have these days, as if the same people make music for everything. The voice acting was terrible and made me cringe HARD, especially the male villain's voice. I streamed every minute that I played it. I started out hoping the story would get better and that the characters would become interesting. But I was disappointed. I did not care about a single character as the game progressed. And I couldn't help but to notice how like 99% of the characters in this game were ugly or weird looking. It made me think that an SJW designed the art. It's okay if some pilots were unattractive, since that is reality. But this really stands out because it appears that someone went out of their way to make all of the women characters look terrible (maybe the male characters too, but I don't look at them in the same way). Sometimes, it was hard to determine if a character's sex were male or female. Now look, I was generally on the political left. But I don't see why it's wrong to have both attractive female characters and unattractive. I worked around female pilots in the Navy. Some were hot, some were not. Nothing wrong with it. But it seems the designers really had a thing against attractive women. I miss MechWarrior 4 and MechCommander Gold's characters. Everyone seemed to have scars or tattoos on their face. Or terrible haircuts. Some characters should have it. But it gets old fast when it seems like all characters are jacked up. The sarna art looks way better. I was really disappointed to learn that BattleTech was going to stick with PGI's mech art. I have probably played MechWarrior Online for 5 years now due to my friends and the community, but I don't like what the game has become, and I never really liked their interpretation of mechs. I understand that it is necessary to make some mechs with different shapes, due to the FPS logistics of it, but BattleTech had a chance to do something different, a chance to have someone with a fresh perspective look at the core mech art and make something new out of that with HD graphics, and hopefully not like what PGI did with the Centurion, Battlemaster, or Kodiak, which looked nothing like what I knew and loved about MechWarrior. I can look at the art of MechWarrior: Living Legends ran in CryEngine 2, and can predict how much better their art would have looked in CryEngine 3 than PGI's art. At first, I recommended this game to my co-worker. But after a few days of playing, I went back to him and said "nope", this game is not what I was hoping it would be. I'll just have to stick to running MechWarriors 2 through 4 in virtual OS's. They're old, but the stories, characters, and art still stand taller through the test of time, than what others can make with better graphics. In some of the missions, it's like the game really tried to force the gameplay by giving a terrible reason why things are happening they way it does. For example, in one mission, a base's turrets are offline because there were enemy vehicles nearby which needed to be destroyed. But how does an enemy vehicle prevent turrets from coming online? I know the game wants the player to destroy the tanks without the help of turrets, but still, they couldn't think of a better reason? This type of bad story telling in missions reoccurs in the game. I'm sure fans will come up with their own ways to explain the story on behalf of the game, but then that's not good storytelling, to need others to explain it for them. More cons: -In the Mechlab, when trying to drop a weapon on an open area, you have to drop it precisely on the first free slot. You cannot just drop the component in any open area, thinking it will then automatically get placed where it should go. -The inability to move mechs' positions in the bays is annoying. -The weapons are not listed properly. This is because the game sees LRM10 and LRM15 as being in the order alphanumerically before LRM5, instead of being programmed to understand the difference. Also, it's frustrating to look for ammo. And when you add one weapon to your mech, you then have to scroll back through the weapons list just to find that same weapon again to add another. The weapon's list does not stay where you left it while adding weapons to your mech. -The Skull/Atlas-head rating system of missions is not exactly an indication of difficulty. It is an indication of combined enemy tonnage, which would include tanks and base turrets, and then c-bills to indicate whether a +4 skull mission may include assaults. This isn't necessarily bad, but players may get confused, and a 2-skull mission may be more difficult to execute than a 4-skull mission, depending on how many enemies are rushing and from which directions. -Kickstarter backer characters are designated as such in the pilots list. It's nice that the game included backers as characters, but don't tell us this in the recruiting area or in the game. Include this in the credits. Don't break submersion in the middle of the game. -The random scenarios which appeared while traveling were lame. Some of them lacked other rational options and consisted of only options that I would never have wanted to pick in the first place. The scenarios were designed to force things along set paths, and that's understood, but it didn't feel like there was much of a choice. -About the fat space Muslim, it was obvious SJW pandering. I understand that in BattleTech there are still people who follow barbaric Earth religions, and that's fine. But this character was so laughable. Every time I looked at her, I lost my suspension of disbelief and immersion in the game. And I'm a brown guy from a mixed Hindu/Muslim neighborhood. But still. I wanted to see all of the main characters die, because that's how horrible they were. This made me miss characters from the previous MechWarriors like Ian Dresari, Jen McQuarrie, Jules Gonzalez, Spectre, Castle, St Claire, Lawhorne, Epona Ri, Dominic, even Casey.

Fantastic game series, a true classic. This game is one of my favorites despite its faults. Pros: fantastic, and mostly true to the table top (TT) game, what a fantastic game. The models are good, terrain is good, fun story line, engaging characters, enough for you to do, and waste hundreds of hours playing. If you like giant robots stomping around, this is it. Music and sound are very complimentary, fantastic. This is the quintessential Battletech game I've always wanted. Whether you are new to the game, or a veteran, there is plenty to like. Cons: The gaming is marred like others said: slow load times, stuttering, lack of code optimization, and a weird kind of "memory leak" where too many save games makes it take forever to load. At the end of 2023, it looks like a few issues were fixed by the dev, but many remain. The best thing they did is add a mod feature, which can be used to install some fan made patches that address MANY of the issues, and allow you to slightly or dramatically alter the game. Many of the mods are old, and the devs added the feature to the game in a patch, making the mod obsolete. I went the road of staying vanilla as possible to the original coded experience, but put in all the performance mods that tightened up code issues. (I DID lower pilot pay though, from 50,000/mo. To 4,800/mo. Closer to TT IMO. The game actually sets salaries at almost 20x higher than TT RPG... I guess to increase the challenge? Silly devs). By adding fix mods, this went from an almost unplayable lagfest, to about 30-60 sec. of load time depending on map. Also, for windows you MUST have at least 16GB RAM minimum. If anything goes to page file, forget it, minimum 5 min wait. I don't have a top end proc, but my video card is well above spec and I play with modest settings. Thoughts: while it can feel sluggish at times, there are many ways to shave seconds or whole minutes off load screens and battles. Well worth the effort. Just get it.

Great game. Has minor issues. I play on a crappy i7 Intel HD 4000 laptop and modern decked out desktop. Gameplay is there on both graphics turned down work fine. Not sure about sluggish performance its turn based. Sit back have a drink and blast some enemies. The 80s are back in computer form.