If you're like me you have played the first Rebel Galaxy and maybe even enjoyed it. I am also a long time player of this genre, space flight sims. I have lots of experience with them and RGO gets a lot of it right, at least on the surface. Give this game a few hours and its flaws are grossly apparent. Specifically the scaling difficulty. Normally a little bit of difficulty scaling makes snese, but this quickly outpaces you to the point when you're busy trying to save up for that first new ship but the enemies you face are based entirely on the money you carry and the upgrade values of your ship components. So this means that you gain money and start saving, but because you don't keep upgrading your ship, the game is more easily able to wipe you. And wipe you they do. Even if you do persue upgrades, you'll always have to fight by the skin of your teeth, and if every fight is that close then the tension just evaporates and instead of exciting, it is excruciating. Within four hours of playing you'll regularly have to fight off 6 or more enemies at once, you have literally seconds or die when you come out of auto pilot and running almost never ever works as the enemies will chase you forever it seems. You really have about two hours of play to learn almost all of this games systems or you are at a disadvantage. Constantly I was getting killed because I didn't know how to do something yet, I was still learning. I really can not understand how developers didn't get feedback like this. Almost every review seems to mention how the difficulty screws over the player. Despite the rocking soundtrack, just don't. Just don't bother with this. You'll be happier if you don't.
Battletech is a game about waiting. You'll wait a lot. A heck of a lot. You'll wait for it to boot up, you'll wait for your save game to load, you'll wait for your squad's animations in combat to finish, you'll wait for the enemies animations to finish(goog god will you ever spend time on this), and you'll wait while travelling from one system to another. I really can't overstate how much wasted time you'll spend watching as animations and cut scenes playout. Near the end of the game you'll easily spend two minutes watching enemy 'mechs move, shoot and other activities while you can do nothing but sit and watch. This waiting is without a doubt, the largest thing holding this game back. The second thing causing Battletech difficulties is how very little is actually explained. The intro might be just about the worst intro I have seen in the last decade of gaming. It is so wholly lacking, that you'll wonder if the game is finished. Then there are the midgame and endgame concepts that recieve almost no words at any point to help you understand them, you're just expected to figure it out. The third, and by no means last thing that causes a problem, is that the game is rather repetitive. By the time you are about 6 hours in, you've really seen almost all there is to see. The enemies don't vary too much after that. By this I mean is that sure, they get different names, but overall, they still play the same, they just have bigger numbers. All in all, definitely get the game if you're looking for something in the Battletech universe, it is quite possibly the best option you'll ever get. But if you're looking for deep, involving strategy, this is about a middle level, not bad, but not amazing.
Glitchy. If I have to choose one word, it is 'glitchy'. constant crashes that wipe out as much as an hours progress. And in a game with randomly generated levels this means that getting back to where you were is even more time consuming because you'll do it all again(with no familiarity to know where to go) but for rewards you already earned! If I could choose a second word, 'obsolete'. This is a genre that was semi common in the late eighties/early nineties. And is should have stayed there. Unless you are a massive fan of Legend of Grimrock, stay away from this. It feels limiting and lacking in gameplay. Technology has progressed past this point a long time ago and to return to it creates repetitive gaming. After about an hour of play, you've seen all Star Crawlers has to offer. Move on, let this genre's resurgence finally end.
