As an old table top mechwarrior, I REALLY enjoyed this game. The storyline didn't have much of an impact on me at first, but then it started growing on me. In the Shadowrun games and sometimes I felt the character dialogue trees went a little long - especially in Hong Kong. For Battletech they were a tad short. I started as the snarky merc and ended rooting for the NPC heroine. The art is top notch. As is the music. The game play is challenging and in ways more intricate than the actual board version. Unlike some people here, the game worked flawlessly on my Mac. In fact, played the full storyline and over 48 hours of play afterwards. IT. NEVER. CRASHED. I don't have ANY Mac or PC program I can say that about. There were THREE instances where it slowed unnaturally. I do miss some of the older mechs (FU Harmony Gold) and I can tell some things didn't make the cut which should have. But over all I'm very impressed. The gender fluid character bit at the front only impacts 5 seconds of the build (be a he/she/they). After that, it plays no part at all in the storyline or the battles. It's an HBS bid to attract millennial appeal and garner a few extra bucks. I hope it works. Your character background does impact things in the storyline, as you'll have dialogue options when you refer to it. If you set up a character with a shady background, there are decision trees in the storyline (but not in the battles) which you can leverage. The one thing I didn't like about the PC building is that they didn't leverage the artist like they did for Shadowrun PCs. So no matter what kind of PC you build, it kind of looks like bad 3d renders.
