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.
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.