BATTLETECH

Not perfect, but a close proximity to the original board game.

[h2] 6/10; Buy on Sale [/h2] I expected more and simultaneously less of Battletech. Mecha games to me center around the three themes of "Violent commentary on politics and/or capitalism", "Sense of disproportionate scale" and "Deep Customisation". The first theme shines through on occasion. Of course, there is the overarching campaign story of a princess in exile being sponsored by a much larger state to reclaim her throne through all-out war. The writers make some half-hearted attempts at having the princess confront the human cost of her royal power struggles, but the dialogue especially is written in a blunt and wooden manner that makes me not care about her, or any of the NPCs for that matter. Your own dialogue options are also atrociously bad. You always have the choice of "Snarky Comment", "I am so honorable and at your service" or "teehee I am edgy and only want money money money". Sometimes, you get a hamfisted option depending on your background. "Yes Ma'am, this escort mission will not be easy. I know this because I worked as a merchant's guard for years. Guarding things. And People." I was severely disappointed by this, especially since I know HBS can do better, as evidenced by the shadowrun games. That being said, the random events involving your mechwarriors are always interesting. The mission briefings felt immersive, being hired by a large successor state to sabotage a planetary government's research facility and abduct their researchers or data. The cutscenes (when they manage to play their sound despite the persistent bugs) are beautiful and decently voice acted, with a standout performance by Elias Toufexis as Samuel Ostergaard. The sense of scale is present throughout, bonus points there. Your mechs all feel weighty, stomping around through badlands, tundra or marshlands and there are plenty of smaller vehicles for you to effortlessly stomp. Once you obtain and field bigger and heavier mechs, it is funny how tiny the light mechs now seem in comparison. Lastly, the deep customisation. I cannot speak to how much this is due to keeping faithfully to the source material and TTRPG, but it is deeply disappointing in this game, at least playing without mods or DLCs. There is basically no weapon variety. You have ballistic weapons (only Autocannons in various sizes), Energy Weapons (Two sizes of Laser and one Lightning Gun that generates way too much heat on anything below a heavy mech) and rockets (which come as long or short range and again in 3/4 different sizes). Support weapons exist but are all short range and safely ignored unless you have leftover tonnage. Equipment is laughably barren, starting you off with heat sinks and jump jets, later expanding into miscellaneous niche buffs with little impact. You can also tweak your mech's armor allocation! But you almost always want to carry the maximum amount, only shaving off rear armor if you're running a longer ranged mech. Combat eventually narrows down significantly. Enemies never eject, so you have to completely disable their mech by either destroying both legs, destroying their core (which has the most amount of armor) or destroying their head, which is basically impossible to do until you get a marauder mech (bonuses on called shots) and a pilot with high gunnery and tactics stats. In the early game, you could also play around with stability damage, which can remove the enemy's evasion points and eventually knock them down. Knocking them down enables you to make a called shot for free and deals one injury to the enemy pilot. But here's the rub: Unless you are very bad at math, you can sustain a good expenses plan for your company, raising your morale level and being able to make called shots more often anyways. And starting in the mid-game, pilots eventually have so many health points, that incapacitating them through injuries is much slower than just shooting out their core, eventually becoming impossible. If you can look past these quirks, you'll find a solid squad-based mecha game, which I hear is greatly enhanced by installing DLCs and mods.