BattleTech (2018)

Battletech is a compelling turn-based game where you lead a mercenary lance of 4 mechs against enemies in a variety of scenarios.

At its surface, you are balancing maintaining the equipment and funding for your merc company, with buying new gear, mech parts, and upgrades for your ship (as well as paying your increasingly expensive mech warriors). You do this through merc contracts, and when accepting a contract, you can negotiate for higher pay, or better salvage.

During battle, too much damage to your mechs means you will have to pay sometimes hefty fees to repair and replace parts, encouraging approaches focused on overwhelming force and engaging enemies in focused ways, because you will almost always be outnumbered.

Pros

Mech Building Creating and customizing mechs works really well. There are a good number of choices to make, and as you play, you get upgraded versions of weapons, allowing even more customization.

In general, the system encourages you to lean into specific roles so that your weapons work effectively together. The suggested builds from the game are pretty terrible.

Learning what I liked to use, and then experimenting when I found new items in shops or on the battlefield, is where like 80% of the fun for this game comes from, and it works well!

Battles The core gameplay is relatively easy to learn, but has some deep strategies tied to using terrain, weapons, builds, and pilot abilities. I appreciate this easy-to-learn, tougher to master approach.

Cons

Story

The story/pacing of the main campaign is almost good in parts, but it has extremely odd pacing. It escalates with some big reveals and developments in the second half, which are tidied up almost as quickly as they appear.

I don't think the campaign is bad, but often it is just a set piece to fight on a unique battlefield, and then make future merc contracts harder.

Oddly, I also found campaign scenarios were pretty easy compared to a lot of the random merc contracts that appear.

Pilot Customization I appreciate that there is some difference between pilots, and that their skills impact weapon use. But the first two choices are really the only ones that matter; after that, you don't have choices you can make. This means early on mech warriors leveling is really exciting, but deeper in its just clicking "next" on a skill tree.

Overall, I enjoyed Battletech. I think if you like turn based strategy it is worth trying. The main campaign is short enough that you could probably complete it in 30 hours if you don't feel the need to grind to gather 5+ Assault Class mechs (like I did)

BattleTech is a mostly okay average game... but i sure did get into it and sunk at least a hundred hours in. (I'm actually installing a Mod while writing this review and plan to fire it right back up again). I've always been a fan of turn based strategy games and this scratches many of my itches nicely. First off, you act as not only a tactical commander but also must manage the financial cash flow of your 'mercenary company' (I really do like business/management simulations that mash with warfare simulators) the customization of your mech 'force' is also really nice (an important thing for any MechWarrior series game) and it even combines some light Role-Playing aspects such as character specialization, light quirks/perks, and Random Encounter Events while travelling from one mission to another. Overall I found it to be a very nice mix of things, but the game has some drawbacks though. First of all know that it's definitely a game you NEED to know how to play and how it works under the hood. It's a game you really need to read about and watch tutorial videos on how it all works. Fortunately, once you learn these things you are good and are ready to experiment and learn how to game the mechanics of it. The game also has a very involved and advanced UI with lots of cues and clues in the form of icons and symbols (again you need to know all this stuff) indicated penalties, debuffs and other advantageous info. Sometimes this works better than other times and you may or may not spot something. Playing this game and doing one battle after another is fun, but after a while it gets VERY repetitive and becomes a grind, because in this game you are basically farming for gear to strap onto your mechs, hunting and collecting +1, +2, and +3 gear upgrades until you twink out your four mech squad with nothing but bonus gear. However by the time you FINALLY manage to do that by end game, the game becomes something of a cheese-fest once you get your squad upgraded, Initially its fun to explore different comps (such as using light mechs) but near mid game its pretty clear you just want bigger meaner mechs over time and wont use anything else! but until you do, enemy mechs will viciously shoot you in the back and target shots on your +1 equipment, destroying it (and you), and making you grind more. This design naturally leads to some serious save scumming (or just doing missions over) do the sunk time investment costs of finding such gear.

In the end I found that this is a well made and solid TBS game with the perfect scope of depth (not too shallow and not too daunting, however it is a bit of a learning curve and a bit different direction than some more clean and simple games in this genre) with a lot of customization abilities that make it quite satisfying if you can get over some of it's flaws and peculiar design choices (such as some aspects of the planetary travel mechanics) I look forward to starting career mode and exploring the flashpoints as I play at least one of these mods (BattleTech Advanced)

Oh, also lots of lore which is somewhat optional if you dont want to do the reading but it's there for those that do.

There is a lot of wonderful stuff in this game. The art direction is great, the scene setting, all the intricate details of managing your merc company are fun, outfitting and refitting mechs feels very involved. There's so much detail that goes into building the world, and there are lots of small gameplay elements that help to build on that. The problem is that all of the scene-setting, music, and atmosphere are in service of weak core gameplay. Everything feels good until you drop into actual combat.

The combat sequences are repetitive, and not much fun. The mechs are total bullet sponges, and you will waste 3-4 turns with four mechs just blasting away at a single enemy. Because of that, the tactical options are pretty limited: it's hard to execute a decisive ambush, hit-and-run isn't really viable, and usually it's best just to post up in an elevated position or a forest and out-shoot the enemy. Like so many strategy games, there isn't much strategy in Battletech, and it's a shame that all the great elements serve such weak core gameplay.