This is brutal. I just spent half an hour on the last leg of an escort mission watching the little allied APCs take 45 seconds each to take their move. Turn after turn after turn. It's not like anything was going on. It was out of combat. They had a simple task, drive from point A to point B. This is after, incidentally, disabling animations, upping the speed 5x, and doing all the fixes on reddit. Often the in-combat AI takes even longer at range but just to show that it can do better, in face to face combat the AI will often (but not always) be as fast as it should be. Is this a Paradox thing? I had the same issue with Age of Wonder 3. Fantastic, deep, and rewarding gameplay marred by glacially slow AI. How did this even clear playtesting and patching? The slow animations, those make sense - I like that the Battlemechs have some weight to them. But lagging on every single AI movement... It undermines what is, on all other fronts, a fantastic strategy game. Battletech like a Trese Brothers' game on steroids. It has just the right amount of roguelike elements to keep it fresh and replayable, backed up with deep and meaningful mechanics. All of this grounded in the rich lore of the Battletech setting. This game was clearly made by people who appreciate the decades of source material. The load times are abysmal but I'm willing to give that a pass. Customize the mechs. Level-up your pilots. Salvage the coolest enemy unit. Try out all kinds of crazy set-ups and hijinks. It's very rewarding. The sub-systems could use a few quality of life improvements - a lot of them waste 20 seconds of your life unnecessarily - but it's forgivable. Of course, it's not so easy to forgive each AI unit deciding to take twenty to thirty times as long as the player to take their turn. This really is a good game. Maybe even great if you're a Battletech fan like me. It really is. But it's hard to recommend it. There's no excuse for AI this laggy on anything approaching a modern PC.
I am new to the franchise and picked this up in a sale, but the core gameplay immediately felt familiar to Dues Ex: Human Revolutions (same developers). The game tells me that I finished at 11.5 hours but my actual time was probably closer to 20 hours with deaths and restarts taken into account. The core gameplay is solid and offers a strong toolkit of options. The problem is in the level design which, on about 70% of missions, feel like puzzles with two-three right answers rather than a sandbox to explore and manipulate. Most of the more open sandbox levels are buried in last few missions of Act 2 and Act 3. I don't like doing thing the same way twice so this left a lot of once and done content. The developers stated that they wanted to deliver a cinematic experience and this game does that, it's still a beautiful game with expressive characters, detailed locations, and strong voice acting. The story is detailed and well put together, but didn't really capture interest. If it were a movie, it's not one that I'd watch again despite the production quality. The various villains are strongly unlikeable, which is strong point, and the main character is a very cool antihero, but there's no great appeal to the others. Which is a problem when cool antihero is supposedly out to rescue a teenager who spends most of the time sitting around half conscious and barely gets any meaningful interactions. The fact that many cutscenes cannot be skipped is problematic on replay. After finishing the game, I found myself interested in going back to explore the world and experiment with different forms of mayhem. But the heavy handed story telling and level design made that feel inaccessible. I think the missing Contracts mode would have added a great deal of replay value to this title but, unfortunately, it's missing. I got a good deal on this game in the sale and I'd buy again, but at this point I'm not sure that I'll replay.
