Having played Mechwarrior and Mechcommander games in the past I was expecting to like Battletech, but I wasn't sure how the turn-based approach would turn out. After finishing the campaign and moving on to career mode, I can say that I love it. Just make sure to turn on "Speed up timeline" and "Speed up combat" in the options (I also disable cinematic cameras and follow cameras). This makes the whole experience much smoother. I saw in old forum posts that initially the game was too slow paced and these options weren't even available, as the developers added them based on criticism. So the game seems to be in a much better state in 2020 than when it came out. In terms of gameplay, it reminds me of XCOM a lot - but what I find better about Battletech is that there is not the feeling of "coin-flipping". Because every Mech has multiple weapons, it's unlikely that you will completely miss a target, even if your positioning is bad. Conversely, XCOM can be so frustrating where a seemingly perfect shot so often misses because of the measly 90% all-or-nothing hit chance.
I also found a many initial complaints about the performance and stability of this game, so I think I should describe how my experience went in terms of stability and performance. I can happily report that is my 70 hours of play (so far) the game has only crashed once. This was when a mission was loading (the game just crashed to desktop) and luckily I did not lose any progress due to autosaves. The performance is excellent - the framerate is stable, load times are actually quite fast, and there are no general hiccups at all. My PC is basically lower end by modern standards and 1080p on maximum details works smoothly at 60 FPS. The specs are i3-9100F, GTX 1660S, 32GB RAM, and the game is installed on a dedicated SSD drive (separate from the OS drive).
