I will try to cover the main points of this game after 70+ hours of play. MAIN PROS: Its a beautifully executed rendition of the battletech universe The core mechanics are solid Initialy it's engaging A fresh and in many ways superior tactical table top simulation for mech combat than classic BT With some tweaking and patches (and mods of your choice if you wish) this game could easily be 5 stars worthy. MAIN CONS: Game constantly steals control of your camera in a often completely fruitless attempt to show you whats happening on the enemies turns. Vanilla BT without mods does not "feel" like BattleTech (example, anything with MGs or lots of missiles is more dangerous than an enemy with harder hitting guns that shoot less often becasue even with head armor still up "any" hit equals a pilot injury). I have had pilots "die" before their armor was even pierced. Pilot injury and recovery mechanic is poorly implemented, and it causes a lot of down time and detachment from your Pilots. Also leads to a good amount of "grinding" to get enough pilots to lessen this issue. Enemy AI acts like skynet trying to eradicate you while denying you everything it can even if it cause is hopeless (25 ton mech with no arms or side torsos charging in to melee an assault mech). "No one" ever ejects. Game does not "scale" well as it progresses (example: ever time a mech is attacked regardless of hit or not they lose "evasion" pips. When your stuck with 4 mechs versus half a dozen or more enemy mechs who will split fire and have vehicle and turret supporting them you "have" to use cheesey tactics and drop all light mechs to survive a lot of missions. It can force your hand and it breaks immersion. Story missions get more more poorly designed as you progress (They often feel like you would need prior knowledge to succedd in them (as in you lose in two turns becasue an APC you didnt know existed moved half way across the battlefield on a road and if you dont kill it that very turn it moves again into an area of the map and you auto lose). Descriptions for missions in general are often completely misleading. The simulation side of the game is all out of balance (example, you negotiate to get good salvage at the cost of basically not getting paid, but the RNG at the end can give you a bunch of ammo and heatsinks (common in all mechs) and flood your salavge haul into netting you almost nothing (as they sell for abut 10% of their already low value). You "salvage" mech parts from enemy mechs you defeat and "magically" get them brand new in your mech bay (when it takes you a month to repair a mech you already own after a hard fight in the begining). If you want a game that fells like a frsh and faithful Battletech turn based strategy game your gonna have to mod it (You really are, and thats whats so frustrating to me about this game. It's not like these moders are doing anything really extreme or hard. A lot of it is literally notepad+ JSON editing).
