After how much I loved MechCommander, and my general love of turn based games, I was surprised by how disappointed I was with BattleTech.

It's a game with some shockingly bad flaws. It doesn't bother to tell you how to play the game until the second mission. I could only get to that after going off and watching a 30 minute YT tutorial on the game's systems and UI in order to beat the first mission. It's kind of ridiculous really.

There are some pretty poorly designed/programmed mission too. There are loads of instances where I've had enemy "reinforcements" show up at the same time, if not before, the main batch of enemies. Once, there was even an animation of a dropship delivering the reinforcement lance of Mechs that played after I'd already destroyed 3/4 of them. Absolutely mad.

The core systems and gameplay are fine but I found them rather tedious after a while, especially combined with the samey missions. The financial roleplaying elements are a bit of a drag more than anything, and I ended up modding the game to minimise them, especially the time taken to re-equip stored mechs.

I'm not sure how far into the campaign I got percentage-wise, but I hit an absolutely insane difficulty spike in the Liberate: Smithon mission, where your four mechs are dropped on the south edge of a turret heavy base and tasked with destroying 8 enemy mechs and also some supply trucks if you want/can. There are ammo dumps around the base which you can destroy, but you're incentivised not to. The trucks are almost impossible to take out before they escape, certainly without having a light, fast mech then stuck in the line of fire of multiple turrets and mechs. You can neutralise the turrets, but taking out the enemy mechs was an absolute slog and even blowing the ammo dumps didn't help. I once blew up an ammo dump and the mech standing with its back right next to the explosion was barely scratched. The entire mission was a slog that took me several attempts across an entire weekend to get through. I was ready to just bail on that, but succeeded on my last attempt. But since that mission, my interest has waned regardless. The charm has gone.

My only issue with this game is that they once agian, for like the 3rd time went with the same tired story of "Ah boohoo my family got betrayed now I'm gonna revenge." Same story in MW4, same story in MW5, same story in MechCommander 2.

The gameplay in this game would make it harder to functionally play at the same scale but MechCommander Gold did a far better job at capturing the scale of Battletech. This game is more like a prolonged campaign with a few friends where one of them has access to infinite units and money, and you actually have to play the game by the rules in BMR level 1. It's fun but do something we haven't seen.

I love the style and vibes of this game, but I grew tired of it pretty quickly. I wanted a bit more from the combat and mercenary company management than it provides, unfortunately.

The format of managing a small mercenary company as they mech their way through proceduralized jobs across the galaxy is cool. There is something very appealing about managing your mechwarriors, upgrading your mechs, and influencing galactic politics.
The campaign narrative is good enough -- restore the leader of a faction who was unfairly betrayed and removed from her position. I didn't find it particularly compelling, but it works as a reason for a bunch of mercenaries to do a bunch of specific missions. I did like that these story missions provide unique environments and objectives for you to play. However, I think the narrative strength in this game lies more in the career mode, where your company is making a name for itself and playing in this political sandbox. The campaign mode is basically a waste -- I would have preferred what the extensive mods do, with these missions and others rolled into career mode as unique events you can pursue.

Battles are evocative and interesting at first. There are 5-6 different mission types that involve assaulting bases, assassinating important figures, escorting convoys, and straight-up battles. These seem like they should be a good opportunity for you to field different mechs and have specialized lances for specialized jobs, but they mostly just turn into straight up battles to the death because of how the combat system works.

The actual combat is... disappointing. Mechs have a ton of armor on each of their parts but once it is gone that part is easy to destroy if you can land some hits on it. Removing specific parts removes functionality (though the UI to glean this information is pretty bad) so destroying arms to get rid of armaments or legs to destabilize the mech can sometimes be a good strategy. Mechs are only rendered inoperative if their central torso is destroyed (effectively destroying the mech and killing the pilot) or if the pilot takes enough damage (head shots, some part destruction, and some specific types of critical hits) to go unconscious, letting you salvage more from the undestroyed mech.
Most attacks are arbitrarily distributed over a mechs parts, but facing matters so you can position yourself to protect certain parts or attack specific enemy parts, though the action economy (move -> attack -> turn over) doesn't let you have enough control over this. It feels like they just did what XCom and Shadowrun do without really thinking about the actual tactics involved in the game. At a baseline, you end up in a slug match as you try to get through the enemy's armor before they get through yours. Over the course of the battle you also generate two special abilities -- one lets you target specific parts with increased hit percentage (so you can actually do the part targeting strategy I mentioned earlier), the other lets you gain defensive bonuses and restore your mech's stability (so you have less chance of being arbitrarily destroyed or knocked down and then destroyed). These really just feel like a bandaid for how arbitrary and repetitive the baseline experience is.
Occasionally, because of crits or lucky hits, you (or the enemy) will land a large hit on a mech that instantly destroys a part or (if the part is the head or central torso) the entire mech. This extremely punishes low tonnage mechs, since they just have much less amor. Seemingly to combat this, moving generates "evasion" which is a stacking buff that seems to just drastically lower hit chance against that mech for one attack. In practice this leads to firing on targets you have no chance of hitting in order to remove their evasion so you can hit them with another, better attack.

This all may just be a fundamental part of the Battletech combat system, as it seems like heavier is always better in these games, but it feels especially bad in a system like this one where it feels like you should think carefully about the composition of your lance and what mechs you are using, but the reality is that heavier is just better in every situation. I wanted to make more interesting choices about how I build and use my mechs, but BattleTech doesn't really support that.

I don't really feel like the battles end up being different enough to keep my attention, and the mercenary company upgrading stuff seems like it is just aiming for "field 4 assault mechs and win every battle" which I don't really care to pursue. I may come back to this game and try out some of the more extreme mods, though, since I think the basic experience has a lot of potential, hamstrung by some balance and systemic issues.

I've enjoyed my time with this game but unfortunately I am dropping it a few missions before the finale of the campaign. The battles have become samey and repetitive, and without a strong story with compelling characters to push me through, I don't have any desire to see the credits. If there was more variety, or if the challenge curve of the campaign were a little better, I might have finished it. Best of luck with your royal restoration Ms. Arano, but I don't particularly agree with the divine right of kings.

This is a great tactics game that has you take over a crew of mercenaries and sends you on a mission to build up a fighting force. You select missions, build your mechs, get your pilots experience, improve your home ship. Mechs can take significant amounts of damage and lose limbs/parts without the pilot dying. That, combined with an initiative system, makes the combat very different from something like Xcom, and in a welcomed way.

As much as I liked the 27 hours I played, however, the game has two big flaws. First, most of your time is spent on battlefields with a jerky camera that moves between your lance and the enemy's on turns. This is extremely annoying and even adjusting the options the game offers doesn't fix it. The second and bigger problem is how slow the fights are. The time between moves and between mech animations became too agonizing for me to finish, even though I wanted to go on and even though I had the option to speed them up turned on.

Aside from this I recommend the game to anyone who likes tactics and/or mechs. Buy it on sale. It's a lot of fun.

Battletech is a turn based strategy game that allows you to hire and rank up a variety of pilots, equip their mechs, and take mission contracts for your four person team to complete. Well thought out gameplay that allows for a good variety of tactical decisions, a good variety of mechs, good mission variety (the the campaign missions often giving unique objectives), and a well made UI that shows you what you need to know. The game feels made to allow for loss of mechs or pilots or for you to have to take the loss of destroyed items and weapons while also paying the repair bill. Good plot supported with nice artwork during cutscenes and an excellent soundtrack. Diverse cast of characters and options for character creations with support for non binary characters. Your background and past actions can effect event choices which can give you different bonuses or penalties for your mech bay, medical ability, faction reputation, etc. Some amusing banter during ship travel as well, though it starts to get repeated quickly. Game also offers a multiplayer mode that gives you a variety of pilots to use with set abilities but still lets you customize the mechs that you want to use in game modes that can allow for different total cost categories. The only real gameplay problem I'm finding is that some of the heavy weapons like the AC10/AC20 and large laser just don't seem useful outside of vehicles or turrets that have them in the single player game.

Very good foundation for future games or expansions, which it sounds like they are working on after the good reception and sales this had.

Estava em uma sede muito específica por esse tipo de jogo, e Battletech aparecer no meio de uma série de nomes que já jurava conhecer inteira foi uma surpresa muito agradável - ao ponto de justificar quase 40h em 5 dias. Este jogo é mistura muito boa e interessante de squad-building, estratégia de turno detalhada, uma curva de poder sacana, elementos de gerência, um mapa de campanha reativo (à la Warband), uma campanha razoavelmente cativante - tudo isso com uma comunidade de modding impressionante e um nível de polidez impressionante. O jogo é imperdoável - você quase sempre luta em desvantagem; não são os heróis de nada - e precisei da ajuda de mods pra domar a curva da dificuldade e conseguir completar a campanha; porém, ainda assim, aprender os diversos sistemas que variam as condições de combate (posicionamento, tonagem, calor, munição) foi uma experiência muito interessante, e o sistema é uma das implementações com ramificações mais interessantes em um sistema básico de combate em turnos que já vi.

Battletech foi o jogo que achei que seria o suficiente para saciar minha sede específica, porém acabou sendo isto e muito mais. É um jogão, e merecia muito mais sucesso do que teve.

There's this phrase eternally uttered among fans of tabletop game that goes something like...

"I wish there was a faithful videogame adaptation of my favourite tabletop game".

It's a nice sentiment, but I can tell you from experience that most people don't actually want that. Warhammer videogame fans, for instance, absolutely don't want to play a game where their carefully assembled Thousand Sons army is torn apart limb from limb by a guy who's been playing Necron since Pariahs were still a thing. D&D fans don't want a game where you don't get to do anything because someone is minmaxing to the point of taking 6 or so actions per run. For a more generalized statement: People clamour for a vague idea of 'faithful videogame adaptation' and never once consider what it looks like, or that the mere act of being faithful leads to what many people/armchair game devs decry as 'bad game design'.

I'm built different though, I actually have wanted a faithful Battletech game for the longest time, warts and all.

Yes, that means I wanted some mechs to be objectively terrible and borderline unusable. Yes, that means I wanted clan tech to shift the power curve unreasonably far. Yes, I wanted to overheat from using my weapons once and then get headbutted to death by a cocky Rifleman pilot. Yes, I wanted to lose mechs to a lucky AC/20 shot from across the map that had about 20% chance to hit. So on, so forth. I actively yearned for a game that was as unpleasant to play as Succession War-era Battletech is on tabletop. I have Mechwarrior 5 if I want one of those newfangled 'fair and balanced videogames' the youth are obsessed with.

HBS Battletech, referred to as such to differentiate it from its parent IP, is the game I've always wanted.

On the surface, HBS Battletech is yet another XCOM clone. Turn based tactics with battles that're defined by positioning, missing 95% chance to hit shots, and reacting to whatever may lurk off screen. Battles that may have negative consequences even if you win due to your deployed units having upkeep costs, repair costs, and other traits that spill out onto your campaign map gameplay.

Where HBS Battletech differs from its ilk, however, is in the customization. Well, 'customization' isn't quite the right word. Here, you're essentially playing the role of an engineer out to fine tune your various Mechs into killing machines that can complete objectives without overheating from a single missile volley, and have enough money to repeatedly deliver those missile volleys without hearing the dreaded click of empty tubes.
Each weapon you can bolt onto a mech generates heat, needs ammo, and has a specific range its most effective at. Each mech you can field has its own varied hardpoints (weapon slots), engine, heat capacity, armor and other endless stats to consider. Plus there are free slots to mount ammo bins, extra heatsinks, additional armor, mods, etc etc.
On top of this, mechs have a tonnage limit. Slap on all you want, but putting 51 tons on that 50 tonner isn't ever going to fly.
On top of THAT, each individual mech part has health, different armor depending on angle of attack, and items are lost for good if a limb is destroyed.

The core of HBS Battletech, arguably more than the actual field gameplay, is a precarious balancing act. Weapons need ammo and heatsinks, but more armor might be the difference between a part being damaged and a part being lost. More weapons can help you kill faster, sure, but mounting all that ammo and those accuracy mods means the repair costs will soar into the stratosphere if the limb they're mounted on explodes. It's one thing to say "I will strap on as many autocannons as possible and go crazy", but what if they explode, player? Now you're down several strong weapons, their ammo, and the money you need to shell out to repair them.

HBS Battletech is a difficult game, there's no sugarcoating it. Oftentimes when people make a statement along these lines, it's followed up by: "It's difficult, but fair! I promise!".

I am a merchant of words, however, and lies are not among my wares. HBS Battletech is bullshit. It is a game where a 100-ton Assault mech clad in enough armor to withstand the heat death of the universe can fall to a few successive headshots from a trashcan with a rifle mounted on it. It is a game where 99% chance to hit should not be read as such, for it is best read as 1% chance to miss. It is a game where you will fine-tune a mech, customize it, give a name like "Anklebiter" and then watch as a tin can with two 1960s machine guns attached to its waist jumps off the top rope and crushes it into paste.

Make no mistake, though. This is not a nail-pulling kusoge that will fight you at every turn, no. Much like learning the actual Battletech, HBS Battletech is a game of risk mitigation. Your early days will suck: You'll teeter closer to debt in game than you are in real life, your mechs will come home missing entire limbs, and you'll sometimes lose more than you gain.
But every failure is a learning experience. A light mech jumping onto your heavy hitter and tearing off an arm is a reminder that it's always worth the action points to remove small threats. Your first death to overheating will remind you that water and rivers are lifesavers. Your first time getting sniped will make you consider the value of Long Range Missile pods. A 'slow' mech getting behind you and blasting your Warhammer to bits from the rear will serve as punishment for not watching your positions.

The learning curve is vertical, but it's still surmountable. Unless one dips into one of the three (excellent) modpacks, it's actually exceedingly rare for a mission to be unwinnable. There's always cover to offset hit chances, water to disperse heat, vantage points for extra accuracy, or something. And you, as a player, will naturally grow and learn the rules of engagement. XCOM-like cluster formations will (hopefully) give way to planned flanking moves, clever use of jumpjets, calculated overheats and other bolder tactics. Remember: Rules are meant to be learned first, broken second. I've always felt tactical RPGs start off encouraging strategy only to discourage it in favour of throwing your best at an enemy. HBS Battletech is consistent, and always rewards good strategy over all else - RNG willing, of course.

Likewise, the game does get easier once you know the arsenal on display here. Being a game centered around the 3010-3040 period of Battletech, the weapon and gear variety is low but in the context of a videogame this means there's nothing truly useless, and every tool is a solution to a problem yet to be unmasked. Even something as simply as the aforementioned shitty 1960s machineguns can turn the tide if you have the tonnage to spare, to say nothing of later acquisitions like particle cannons and targeting modules.

As opposed to many of its peers, much of the difficulty is easier to stomach because battles are far less rapid. This is not XCOM 2 with its rapid fire series of traded instant kills, nor is it Rogue Trader with its 10 actions per character turn, and it is not Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters with its 'being terrible'.
Fights in Battletech are slugfests. Simply 'depleting health' is out of the question, for the game is a race to dissasemble a mech by either destroying its ability to fight, destroying the engine or destroying the pilot. Losing an arm sucks, but a mech that can still shoot is a mech that can still kill. Damaged is different from Dead, after all, and torso-mounted weapons are always a good investment as they're usually the last to go.

That all said, there's a reason I docked half a star: Much like vanilla Mechwarrior 5, a lot of vital information about a mech (free tonnage, engine type, engine heatsinks, etc etc) is withheld from the player. It's one thing to say that the player will come into possession of better Mechs, aye, but it's often hard to know what's good just from looking at the store.
Take the Cicada, for instance. It's a surprisingly fast Medium mech that mounts some okay weaponry, so you might think "Wow! I'll take that as an armoured scout!" Except... The Cicada is overengined - meaning it mounts an engine far too large for its chassis - and thus has terrible free tonnage. Plus, for a Medium mech, its armor is atrocious and for its weight class the weaponry is appalling. These traits are all difficult to discern from looking at it in the store/salvage assembly, and indeed there are more than a few mechs that suffer from the same problems. Early in a campaign/career, these aren't easy to mitigate and Blake help anyone who buys a Charger.

Ultimately, despite the constant XCOM comparisons, I'd say that HBS Battletech has more in common with FTL: Faster than Light, much like its peer WH40k: Mechanicus. All three are games which are more about parts than any collective whole, heavily defined by calculated risks and how the player reacts to damage/losses that they know are inevitable. Games where the hits will come, but can be endured with varying degrees of competence. Where success is never guaranteed, but always possible.

The presentation is also deserving of glowing praise. There's a story, and while it's hardly a modern epic, it perfectly captures the feeling of frontier life in the Battletech universe complete with that mix of mechanized warfare and space western that defines pre-Clan Battletech. All of the VAs are relative unknowns, but their performances are stellar and contribute well to the atmosphere. As usual for Battletech media, the art direction is out of this world and I have great love for the battle maps too, for they manage to blend gameplay-first practicality with gorgeous mood lighting and respect for the source material. Nothing in this game is as high in fidelity as Mechwarrior 5 - though as a Paradox published game, it's sure priced as if it were >.> - but everything fits so wonderfully.

And the audio, oh the audio my beloved. Lasers purr with a satisfying hum as they miss 98% shots on a mile-wide target, autocannons have a hefty boom on launch, missile pods sound like a dream when they go off and collide with a wall, and every mech stomps and whirrs as it moves. Couple that with an amazingly atmospheric soundtrack, great ambience and the pilots calling out every other action, and each battle is a soundscape like no other.

If you want my advice, though? Beat the story once, and then pick up one of the three modpack: Roguetech, Battletech Advanced 3062 or Battletech Extended, listed in order from hardest to easiest. I have a personal preference for BTA 3062, as there's the option to dump some of the excessive stuff and just get more from the game. The better mechlab, bigger starmap and Clan tech really do augment the experience.

Buy it via the grey market, though, because Paradox's bullshit claimed another studio.

I grew up playing the Mechcommander games and was excited for this, until I heard it was turn-based strategy. I tried it out on a free weekend and took it off my wishlist. I ended up getting it with a Humble Bundle and really gave it a shot past the first two missions.

Harebrained Schemes are great at storytelling, considering the Shadowrun series. They took what could have been a generic robot-shooter game and placed you in the middle of the expansive Battletech universe to play through one experience in what could have been thousands. The writing makes you feel like a part of it, and that the characters matter. That is if you choose to dialogue with them, which I highly recommend.

The only TBS I had experience with were X-Com and some RPG games, and the genre usually turns me off because it feels slow, unfair and based on random numbers that are literally hit-or-miss. So, I tried this after a few missions and really began to enjoy the TBS and feel it was an appropriate adaptation of a mech game - especially considering it's derived from a tabletop. As an action game, it feels very good to position and reposition your squad and to take objectives, as much as any isometric action game. The accuracy of your weapons make perfect sense, taking advantage of distances, elevation and structures to retreat, flank, and engage in direct battles, and it really feels fair if you take a chance at shooting a mech in cover and miss. I think back to my Mechcommander days and figure that this is how my missions would play out, except that I have to choose to end turns. It would feel fair that my light took some hits while scouting, and that my heavies could come through the hills to take and receive some as well. This is all because of how you build your mech in the mechlab and which mechwarrior you choose to place in the mech.

The skill trees are well balanced and the mechlab are follows the already well thought out design of a Mechwarrior/Mechcommander game, but a simpler version. There's the usual specifications for mechs between armour, weapons, hardpoints, and equipment, and they made the salvage system feel rewarding and exciting to take parts to the mechlab. The mechwarrior skill trees make sense for balancing the power of firing, taking damage, keeping the mech stable, and calling specific shots on enemies between passive and active skills. There are options to mix and all of these help with building the mech you want and what squads you will send out.

My only complaint is that loads are long, when loading a save, loading a contract then loading the mission. It almost freezes to the point I can't use background apps during the loads, and I'm on a AMD Ryzen 5, with a GTX 1080 and 8GB RAM. I understand that it's developed in Unity, and the landscapes and models really feel like they're constructed with very fine detail. In fact the game looks beautiful for an isometric shooter, and I didn't realize this until I zoomed in, called some orders on my mechs to move and blow up a building, and then watched it crumble to pieces. I'm not sure if the loading feels this bad because the game is actually larger than I thought, or because of optimization. Beyond that, some UI features feel like they're missing, like you can get ready to move a mech, see it's possible positions, line of sight and accuracy of hits, but you can't find the range of a Mech, even after displaying

I'm excited to get through the campaign of this game, go through the expansions and just play, because both the management of a mech squad feels just as great as the strategy and action in missions.

Fantastic adaptation in terms of gameplay, presentation, and story, albeit with several balance issues and mechanics that got changed that make me question their inclusion, like the evasion pip system that makes light mechs basically useless if the enemy has higher numbers than you, and enables rewards for bad plays like shooting at an enemy with a 5% chance to hit so you can hit it with a different mech with more accuracy. Mods make the game an absolute masterpiece, and there are several total conversions that align the game more with its tabletop origins.

Without lore to force certain mech choices, you have to choose what actually works in battle. And unfortunately as this game tries to stick with canon load outs, that means no much.

Oh sure, you can reconfigure your mechs to be walking death machines that actually work (or really just marauders and Atlas IIs), but because of the games modification system, you will just take the mechs with the good quirks from the DLCs and ignore every other thing you find.

The story is fine, and all that's needed for your stompy walking tank game. But the universe feels shallow, as there are just too few interesting ways to bling out your mechs. But fortunately there is an insane amount of mods to make is just as in depth as you actually want.

Going in without any knowledge of the tabletop games rules or setting I only had my love for Xcom style tactics games get going. It took a few tries to get over a high initial hump of the depth you get presented in terms of mech customisation. After I realised that all the default loadouts are balanced and designed to the niche each mech fits, the favourites were easy to find, and fine tuning came easily with familiarity. The story is nicely presented and brings a good variety of missions to break up the regular proc gen contracts, even if the writing is fairly stock and the roleplaying dialog options are only visual. Super satisfying tactical combat that sells the tonnage of the mechs kept me coming for mission after mission.