Need to know What is it? Turn-based tactical mech combat game with an XCOM-style campaign mode.
Expect to pay $40/£35
Developer Harebrained Schemes
Publisher Paradox Interactive
Reviewed on Intel Core i7-6700K @ 4.00 GHz, 16Gb RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 980
Multiplayer Online, up to 2 players
Link Official site
If, as Sid Meier likes to say, good strategy game design boils down to providing a series of interesting decisions, then what comes next should be a series of interesting consequences. This is where BattleTech excels. Harebrained Schemes has taken the hard sci-fi tabletop game (best known to PC players as the basis of the MechWarrior series) and married it to the XCOM formula in a way that brings out the best qualities of both.
You field a lance of up to four bipedal battlemechs in open-ended, turn-based combat encounters that cover swathes of open terrain. Unlike many of its tactical peers, BattleTech doesn't use a grid—this is a far more granular wargame than most, asking you to pay attention to not just the position of each mech but also its degree of rotation, its speed, and its relationship with its environment.
Here's an example of how this might play out. Taking advantage of the initiative bonus granted to light units, your opponent activates their Jenner skirmish mech and has it sprint into a flanking position along a distant treeline. Moving a longer distance grants it several stacks of the evasion buff, and moving into trees provides cover. In response, you move your Wolverine medium mech into a firing position—but the Jenner's evasive action makes your odds of hitting pretty low.
However, this Wolverine is piloted by a mechwarrior with the Sensor Lock ability, allowing them to forgo shooting to strip two stacks of evasion from the Jenner and reveal them to your other battlemechs. This in turn allows your heavier Trebuchet mech to launch an indirect attack with its long range missiles: the barrage catches the Jenner out, dealing critical damage and blunting the flanking attempt. You've committed two mechs to dealing with what could well be a feint, however, and now your opponent has an opportunity to exploit your new position. Situations like this are the meat of BattleTech as a wargame.
The metal and the meat
The fact that this is a game about vehicles, rather than soldiers, is vital. Mechs take damage based on the precise angle of each assault, with layers of armour protecting specific components, weapons, and ammo housed in one of 11 body segments. You must also consider the heat generated by your weapons, each mech's ability to keep itself cool, and how this relates to your environment: an Orion standing in a river can fire indefinitely, while an Orion standing on an exposed hilltop on a moon with no protective atmosphere will overheat very quickly. There's also stability to consider: take too many successive hits, or a critical strike to the legs, and a mech can fall with potentially devastating consequences.
All of this is driven by the dense internal logic of the BattleTech universe, which spans from the internal workings of each mech to the technology that powers interstellar travel and communication. Becoming a better commander means understanding the exact strengths and weaknesses of each of your combatants. New players will inevitably make mistakes, but with experience comes a gratifying sense of understanding and ultimately mastery. If you've played a MechWarrior or BattleTech game before—if you know your LRMs from your PPCs—then you've already got a head start. It's a testament to Harebrained Schemes' success at adapting the source material that skills developed in very different games are transferable to this one.
The UI has so much information to impart that it can initially seem a little overwhelming, but with time and greater fluency I came to appreciate how much it manages to express with relatively few elements. BattleTech has no undo function for a turn gone awry, so it's vital to know exactly where your mechs will end up after a move, what they'll be able to see, and who can see them—the UI achieves this. There's plenty of detail to dig into, too—while initially you might see a red signature on the long-range scanners and not know what to do about it, with more experience you'll learn to pay attention to the tonnage of the incoming foe, weigh this against your understanding of the various mech types, and plan accordingly.
It's not perfect. Cancelling out of a planned move or attack is unintuitive, and what a given mech can see and shoot at doesn't always align perfectly with the battlefield. The line-of-sight indicator might tell you that you've got an unobstructed shot at an opponent on the other side of a big rock, and in the jankiest edge-cases this'll result in you firing accurately through level geometry. The vital thing is that the targeting indicator is always right, regardless of what your eyes might otherwise be telling you, but this aspect of the tactical game could certainly use a bit more polish.
In the singleplayer campaign, you take the role of a mercenary commander dragged into a war between great houses on the fringe of human civilisation. Your primary objective is not simply to win battles: it's to pay the bills, build up your roster of mechwarriors and battlemechs, and upgrade the ship that carries you from planet to planet. As in XCOM, this strategic layer grants additional significance to each battle you fight. When one of your pilots comes under sustained fire you must consider ejecting them, or risk losing them forever.
BattleTech is a far denser game than XCOM, however, and as such the consequences of both success and failure are more interesting. You might win a battle but lose the arms of one of your best mechs, incurring expensive and lengthy repairs—and potentially a journey to find and replace their rare SRM 6++, a special variant with slightly buffed stability damage. On the other hand you might be hopelessly outmatched in a battle, but if you can score a single objective before retreating then you'll earn a good-faith failure and partial payment. When that payment lets you keep the lights on for another month, running away can feel like a victory in a way that it rarely does in this type of game.
Mercenary life
There's a lengthy, story-driven series of critical path missions to guide you, and while these are ostensibly optional they often come with the best rewards and gate your access to certain game features. I enjoyed the story, but diving into it headlong feels like the right way to play in a manner that undermines the freedom that an open campaign structure purports to offer. Similarly, the campaign's light RPG elements feel underdeveloped. When you create your character you construct their background through a questionnaire, but the choices you make here don't seem to impact very much at all. Likewise, each of your pilots has a series of keywords that define who they are—criminal, soldier, noble, etc—but this never seems to have an influence on battles or the story. These feel like hooks for systems that aren't quite in place yet, and their absence is one of the things holding BattleTech back from all-round excellence.
Performance BattleTech performed consistently well in its turn-based combat mode—you'd expect it to, given that it can look pretty dated at times. However, load times on a regular HDD are surprisingly long especially when loading the game up 'cold', and I experienced sporadic slowdown in the interfaces you use to manage your ship and battlemechs in the campaign. This didn't impede my ability to make progress, but it is frustrating when it occurs.
There can be frustrating moments, too. Every time an otherwise well-positioned mech takes fire, there's a chance that something goes critically wrong. Given how risky each mission can feel, taking that one-in-a-hundred crit that takes one of your best pilots out of action for a month feels pretty bad. The tendency for the AI to focus on exploiting weakness—while smart strategically—can also result in rough situations where waves of hitherto-unseen enemy reinforcements pummel a single mech to pieces before you can do anything about it. The answer is to take as few risks as possible, which is a worthy tactical lesson but slows the game down considerably. In Skirmish mode, where combatants field matched forces, this isn't an issue.
I've got a few concerns about how difficulty varies from mission to mission, too. Noticing some strange spikes—battles that seemed wildly harder or easier than their listed difficulty rating—I tried generating the same battle twice by loading a previous save. The first time, I faced a heavy mech, two medium mechs and a heavy tank supported by a reinforcing lance of mixed heavy and medium mechs. The second time, I faced a squad of four heavy tanks supported by mixed medium and light mech reinforcements. The second version of the same mission—same objective, same payout—was considerably easier. Variance like this encourages the player to load a save rather than live with the consequences of a mission gone south, which is directly contrary to one of BattleTech's most pronounced strengths—the intricate relationship between the outcome of a battle and your overall campaign. There's no 'iron man' mode to force your hand, so it's ultimately on you to respect the negative consequences of a tough fight.
These are inconsistencies in what is otherwise an accomplished and fundamentally sound strategy game. BattleTech's success at making you feel—and want to live with—the interesting consequences of each mission is its greatest achievement, and will hopefully have an influence on other developers working in this genre. Where it fails, it fails because it doesn't fully implement all of its best ideas. Given the quality of what it accomplishes elsewhere, however, that's a good-faith sort of failure.
Note: this review is based on advanced access to an early version of BattleTech. As such, we were unable to gauge the performance of the multiplayer mode in a live environment.
BattleTech is a deep and granular tactics game. Avoiding disaster means paying attention to the details of a given encounter, and inevitably you're going to make a few costly mistakes along the way. Ahead of the game's release, then, here are a few learnings from the battlefield. If any of these tips help you avoid having your favourite mech's arms and legs shot off, then I've done my job.
Get to grips with armour, heat, and stability
Experienced BattleTech or MechWarrior players know this already, but each mech is more than a healthbar with a gun. It's actually lots of healthbars with several guns, and trying to attack all of them isn't the right way to approach combat.
Take a look at the bars over a given mech's head. Here's how that breaks down: the white squares are armour. This bar is a simplified view, but broadly speaking the first half of the bar is front armour and the second covers the rear (it's much more granular than this, really, but let's go with that for now). Armour is basically free to replace and protects your internal systems.
Structural damage is very bad. This is how you lose arms, legs, weapons, and pilots.
The orange squares represent internal structure—damage to these systems is likewise represented by orange, rather than white, damage numbers. Structural damage is very bad. This is how you lose arms, legs, weapons, and pilots. Concentrating fire on a given part of a mech will strip its armour first, then inflict structure damage, ultimately destroying the component.
The red bar is heat, which is generated by firing weapons and can be increased by environmental effects, losing heat sinks, and with flame weapons. If the heat bar fills up all the way to the top, the mech shuts down and needs to be rebooted, and can even take severe damage.
Stability, the yellow bar, is a measurement of your mech's balance. It builds as mechs take damage and can be given a major push with either focused fire to legs or a melee strike—though bear in mind that death-from-above attacks, where you use jumpjets to bop an enemy mech on the head like Mario, also wreak havoc on your own stability. If the stability bar fills up, the mech falls down. A fallen mech falls behind in the initiative order and can't get up until its own turn, during which time enemies get to make precision called shots against any components they want. Falling down is bad. Don't fall down.
Learn counters to Evasion, Guarded, and Entrenched
These are the defensive buffs that you'll see in every battle. Stacks of Evasion are gained when mechs move. They last until that mech's next activation, and moving further adds more of them. Each stack makes that mech harder to hit with ranged weapons. Evasion can be mitigated by using the Sensor Lock ability—part of the Tactics line—which removes two stacks, or you can get around it with melee strikes. Taking fire will also strip a stack of Evasion even if the attack misses. This is often a good use of light mechs and weapons that aren't in their effective range bands, helping them set up better shots for your more powerful weapons.
Guarded and Entrenched are buffs applied when a mech takes the brace action. Guarded halves incoming damage from the front and sides, while Entrenched reduces stability damage. The ideal response is an attack from the rear, but this isn't always possible. A successful melee strike can strip away Guarded, however, so a good opening against a bracing foe is to send a fast mech to headbutt them before the rest of your guns open up (although bear in mind that this is likely to open up your light mechs to a potentially deadly counter-attack).
Factor in repair time
When you start out in the campaign, you'll naturally be concerned with earning money. That's a healthy concern: being unable to pay your monthly upkeep costs is a critical fail state. However, you'll quickly find that the time it takes to repair stuff is more costly than the money it costs.
There's an opportunity cost associated with repairs and refits that must be accounted for. If you can't do a lucrative mission because your best kit is in the shop, then you're effectively in the hole for that amount of money. This problem becomes less pronounced later in the campaign when you have more mechs and an upgraded mech bay, but early on you'll want to plan your missions very carefully. If you take a few easier and less rewarding missions and do well, you might make more money overall than if you fling yourself into a tough challenge and wreck your mechs doing it. Similarly, it's sometimes worth spending an entire month on repairs and refits rather than taking on work 'just because.'
Salvage: it's good
When you take on a mission, you're able to figure out how you want to divide up the reward between cash, priority salvage rights, and faction reputation. Early on, the temptation is to crack that money slider all the way up. However, don't underestimate the usefulness of salvage.
A higher salvage claim allows you to pick up more stuff from the battlefield—this is based on specific damage done over the course of a mission. Broadly speaking, it comes in two forms: specific bits of gear (like jumpjets or lasers) and mech salvage. Collecting three pieces of mech salvage of a particular type allows you to add that mech to your roster.
Here's the thing, though: when I started out, I understood this as 'mech salvage allows you to build that mech for yourself.' That's not right. When you finish the set, you immediately get access to that mech with its basic loadout—weapons and all. This can act as a huge force multiplier, particularly when you're struggling to keep your main roster out of the repair bay for long enough to fight. My campaign hinged on a mission where I sniped the pilot of a massive Battlemaster assault mech, allowing me to fully salvage it and putting me into a much higher weight class for the subsequent missions.
Plan pilot training ahead of time
Each pilot gains XP over the course of the campaign, and you'll invest that XP in four paths: Gunnery, Piloting, Guts and Tactics. Each path has two special abilities. You can ultimately maximise all four paths, however you can only ever have the first special abilities from two trees, and the second special ability from one. The second special ability you choose determines that pilot's final class designation—for example, if you pick up the second skill in the Gunnery path you become a Lancer.
Piloting grants pilots extra evasion charges when they move, and Guts grants them Guarded and Entrenched for free as long as they stay still.
This means that effectively you're building a custom class out of a combination of two paths. A reliable combination I found was to pair either Piloting or Guts with one of the other two skills. This is because Piloting and Guts each grant different, incompatible passive defensive abilities. Piloting grants pilots extra evasion charges when they move, and Guts grants them Guarded and Entrenched for free as long as they stay still.
Here are some sample combos: combine Guts and Gunnery for a pilot that specialises in reaching a vantage point and sniping with high-impact weapons like PPCs and large lasers. Alternatively, combine Guts and Tactics for a pilot that is good at hiding behind a hill, sitting stationary, and bombarding foes with long-range missiles.
Combine Piloting and Tactics for a pilot who excels in fast mechs, moving up quickly at the top of the initiative order to apply Sensor Lock to priority targets. Or combing Pilot and Gunnery for a skirmisher that remains mobile on the move.
You'll figure out other combos you enjoy with a bit of time. Piloting and Guts is actually pretty good for a melee-focused mechwarrior, as it allows you to sprint into melee range with extra Evasive charges and then defend yourself during a slugging match with Guarded and Entrenched.
The reserve function is important
While moving first in the initiative order can be very useful, it also establishes that mechs' positioning and defensive buffs very early in the round—letting your opponent act with perfect information. Opting to Reserve instead shunts a mech into the next initiative slot, allowing you to act after your opponent if you choose. Always remember that you have this option, because it can open up strategic possibilities.
For example: if you have a Tactician in a heavy mech (there's a decent chance of this, as they make a good choice for artillery mechs) then they'll naturally go later in the order. This makes Sensor Lock less useful, as your lighter mechs shoot before it can be applied. By using Reserve to shunt your light and medium mechs into a later initiative slot, you can then use your Tactician to set up a Sensor Lock for their teammates to exploit.
Understand your Inspiration abilities
As your mechwarriors fight they build morale points, and you'll start with a huge bonus pool of them if you can keep them happy outside of battle. These allow you access to two special abilities—Precision Shot and Vigilance—that are essential for overcoming stacked odds. Knowing how and when to use them is how you win battles, and both have obvious and less-obvious uses.
Precision Shot allows you to take a called shot (where you get to pick the body part you want to strike) against an opponent that hasn't been knocked down. The obvious use of this is to try to take out legs or weapons before your foe gets to act. The other crucial aspect of Precision Shot, however, is that it pushes your opponent back a slot in the initiative order. This is, I'd argue, the more important thing about it. One targeted shot is good: an enemy being forced to take alpha strikes from your entire lance because you pushed them deeper into the initiative queue is better.
Vigilance applies Guarded and Entrenched to a mech regardless of the situation they find themselves in, but it also—crucially—moves them ahead in the initiative order and removes all stability damage. It's this final bit that I've found match-winning. When you're commanding massive assault mechs, you'll often find them teetering uncomfortably at the upper end of their stability bars at the end of a full turn of shooting—and being so heavy, they almost always act last. Saving morale points to use Vigilance is often worth it because it lets mechs stay on their feet on turns when they're otherwise guaranteed to get knocked down.
Anticipate concentrated fire
Here's a final hard-won lesson: the AI loves to concentrate fire on a weak target. This is appropriate, given that you'll be doing the same thing to their units, but the difference is that you field up to four mechs and the AI fields anywhere from four to a dozen, plus static defenses, tanks, and so on.
Here's how this can go wrong: you advance a scout mech to take a potshot at a single mech at the vanguard of the enemy force. You don't kill them. They provide line of sight to your scout mech to every single other enemy unit, which—for the sake of argument—comprises a tank column each armed with long range missiles. Your scout mech, evasive though it may be, then gets to enjoy an entire round of LRM fire from every single enemy on the map. If you still have a scout mech at the end of this experience: congratulations. I didn't.
Here's another example: your assault mechs are doing well but one of them has lost all of the armour on its left side. The entire enemy army falls in love with the left side of that mech, moving to annihilate it at the expense of closer targets. It looks weird but it's very effective. You lose your assault mech and possibly snap your keyboard in half.
The AI can be a bit weird at times, in that regard, but it's also consistent—and there are things you can do about it. The first is to be careful, as a rule, and to pay attention to both line of sight and scanner range. If you can scan them, they can scan you: and it only takes one enemy mech with line of sight to open up the danger of indirect fire. Kill spotters and break line of sight where you can. Often, revealing a bunch of full-health mechs at once is a good way to encourage the AI to split its fire.
Mech orientation matters
The worst way to spend an attack, usually, is spreading your damage evenly across all body segments of an enemy. Whenever possible, flank or angle your mech so that its weapons have a greater chance of hitting the softest side of your enemy. You can also try to prioritize a key weapon, like a Hunchback's AC/20, by going after its armor location from the outset.
On defense, if your mech has lost all of the armour on its left side, move it so that your opponent is forced to shoot it from the right—even if this means you don't get to shoot. Then, take the brace action. Golden rule: it is almost always better to give up your shot for a turn to force the AI to waste theirs. Don't turn in for a shot until you know it's going to do maximal damage, because—with a vulnerable mech—it could well be the last shot they get to take.
Share. Exciting strategic decisions and a compelling story are held back by RNG aiming. Exciting strategic decisions and a compelling story are held back by RNG aiming.
Rocket boosting a 60-ton mech to the top of mountain then raining down missiles on your enemy will never not be cool. At the same time, seeing every single piece of that salvo miss the one body part you were actually aiming for is pretty much the polar opposite of satisfaction. Such are the highs and lows of BattleTech, a turn-based tactics game that has as much exciting flavor as it does an overreliance on infuriating random-number generation.
BattleTech is an old and iconic franchise that began on the tabletop, where it spurred the creation of video game series like MechWarrior and MechAssault with its giant walking tanks. Here, in a turn-based setting in which you control a highly customizable lance of four mechs, it feels at home. It’s a thoughtful game that encourages careful planning in both the composition of your mech fighting force and the shots you tell them to take, but some design missteps often rob the execution of that planning of much of its potential impact.
Exit Theatre Mode
Running a mercenary company is more than just firing missiles. While half of BattleTech is about strategy and tactics in the field, the other half puts you in charge of mechwarrior pilot training, mech customization, and choosing contracts to make sure you have enough money at the end of each month to fund the whole operation. That’s all while completing main campaign missions, but even those are effectively optional (but lucrative) if you want to ignore politics and just make your way through the world one job at a time – though I don’t recommend it, because you’d miss out on the best part of BattleTech.
The main story’s handcrafted missions are full of lore and dialogue to read between and during missions, and it’s all written extremely well. I cared for the characters and the story being told as I fought for the Arano Restoration, and the objectives that story presented to me with in the field — like saving escaping civilians or raiding ancient military bases — were significantly more challenging, interesting, and well put together than anything I found taking a random contract.
Fighting on 50 Tons of Explosives
But even if that story is well told, at its radioactive core, BattleTech is about its fights – and unfortunately, that’s where it can be hit and miss (very literally). There’s a lot I love about the strategy behind each fight; positioning, heat management, and targeting all offer interesting decisions to make and different strategies to learn. But it’s hard not to feel that all those best-laid plans can go to hell simply because of a lucky shot or an unlucky miss, and in a way that’s much more frustrating than you see in other percentage-based tactics games like XCOM 2.
Exit Theatre Mode
Every mech has 11 different sections: the head, left and right arms, left and right legs, and then front and back pieces for the center, left, and right torso sections. When you are outfitting your mechs on your ship, you can place weapons, ammo, jump jets and more on specific parts of your mech, as well as adjust the armor for each piece. That means that each of the 11 parts has its own armor health bar, as well as another health for its internal structure.
“ I love to scout out enemy mechs, see a big weapon on their left arm, then aim to blow the left shoulder to take it out.
Once you blow through a piece’s armor the part itself starts taking damage. If that health bar runs out then the piece explodes, along with everything attached to it. Blowing up the head (which is very hard to hit) or center torso (which is usually heavily armored) will even kill the mechwarrior inside, taking the entire mech down with them. It’s a complex system to initially wrap your head around, but also a very cool one on paper.
I love being able to scout out enemy mechs, see that their biggest weapon is on the left arm, then plan to blow up their poorly armored left shoulder to destroy both parts at the same time. It also means I can plan my own mechs accordingly, adding extra armor to parts with important equipment. It influences my positioning on the battlefield too, allowing me the keep the important or injured side of my mechs faced away from the front line.
At the same time, BattleTech’s at-a-glance health bar UI can be frustratingly misleading. Each unit has a bar with its current structure health on the left and armor on the right, but a mech with a near-full bar could potentially be within an inch of death if it’s hit in the wrong spot. Those bars don’t scale consistently across units either, so a turret with seven structure health and 100 armor will have a bar that, at a glance, looks extremely similar to that of a unit with significantly more health. Thankfully, it’s easy enough to click a unit for an accurate breakdown, but the misleading display duped me into a few mistakes early on.
Exit Theatre Mode
But worse than that, RNG often rears its ugly head to turn any plans I make into guesswork instead of tactical destruction. When you take a shot, each individual weapon displays a percent chance to hit based on distance, the defense of your target, and few other things. Once something successfully hits, each visible piece of the enemy then has another percent chance of what part it will land on. That double layer of randomness makes it difficult to reliably hit a specific part with a regular attack.
There are ways to increase your odds, most notably an ability all mechs have called Precision Strike that lets you target a specific part with a modest probability bump. But using Precision Strikes costs Morale, a resource shared by your entire squad and regained throughout a fight, so you have to save it for important attacks and can’t just use it whenever you want – and you are actually encouraged to horde Morale to earn a small, squad-wide buff. On top of that, Precision Strike doesn’t solve the issue that it’s still just as hard to predict where an enemy will land their damage on you.
The difference between dealing 100 damage to single part instead of spreading it out across multiple pieces is night and day, and whether or not you do is largely out of your hands. I’ve had dozens of moments where I only needed a few missiles to land on a specific part to finish it off, doing everything I possibly can to maximize those odds, but they’ll just pepper the enemy’s unscratched armor instead. That stings, and feels downright disgusting when that enemy then turns my way, gets lucky, and lands a full salvo on a nearly full health center torso to instantly destroy one of my more pristine mechs.
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Naturally, I’ve gotten lucky kills and lucky saves just as many times as I’ve been killed or missed killing in the same way. The RNG gods giveth and taketh away. I’m not bitter about a bad hit here and there, I simply wish shots were more controlled across the board. I’m sick of pumping loads of unnecessary attacks into an enemy, praying I hit the part I had used Precision Strikes to soften up before running out of Morale, only to get unlucky and spread that damage almost harmlessly across the rest of its armor. It just feels bad, and as if no planning in the world can account for it.
Hot Hot Heat
“ Deciding what weapons to turn on or off so you don't overheat can offer some interesting choices.
Which is a shame, because I love the other strategic decisions that go into a fight. BattleTech made me think about positioning in a big way, as your mechs have a limited firing arc and every weapon has its own minimum, optimal, and maximum firing distances. That means picking your movement can be incredibly important, both in angling around opponents while keeping them at the right range and making sure you aren’t letting them do the same.
The jump jets you can strap to most mechs are a ton of fun as well. They allow you to rapidly reposition and can enable lighter mechs to unexpectedly get behind enemies at times. They also give your mechs the ability to do a falling melee attack from above, though that’ll do damage to yourself as well as an interesting trade-off. The jump jets open up a wide range of tactical options and can be used surprisingly liberally too, as long as you can spare the heat to use them.
Heat management is probably my favorite aspect of combat. Every weapon generates heat when fired, with energy weapons like lasers heating you up more than physical options. You could put out some serious damage by unloading everything you’ve got, but it could also cause you to overheat and potentially even shut down. Deciding what weapons to turn off to stay cool and thinking a turn or two ahead to when you might need to fire more than you can afford now offers some interesting choices that skirt around the RNG.
Exit Theatre Mode
Heat is also cleverly influenced by your surroundings, so moves like walking into water can cool down your mech quicker. It might not surprise you to hear that it’s harder to cool down in a desert setting, and easier on a polar planet. That means you can start planning your heat management before you even begin a mission. I loved checking the planetary conditions, seeing it was a hotter setting, then choosing mechs with fewer energy weapons so I wouldn’t have to worry about holding back as much.
Even with all that planning, winning fights can become a game of mitigating losses. There are no repairs and no healing on the battlefield, which made me think hard before I left a mech out in the open. And while a destroyed mech can be recovered and put back together after a mission, an incapacitated mechwarrior is almost always gone for good. So even if a mech could keep fighting, I sometimes made the choice to keep an injured mechwarrior far from the action to make sure they lived to see another day. The ‘meat’ is cheaper than the ‘metal’, as they say, and it’s not hard to replace them, but it still sucks to lose a veteran mechwarrior to a random 1% head hit.
Taking losses and rolling with the punches is a fundamental part of BattleTech, and you can even withdraw from non-story missions for docked pay if you want to cut your losses without save-scumming. But restarting a story mission can suck massively because they often take more than an hour to complete. That’s made worse by the ridiculously long load screens I experienced when BattleTech was installed on a hard drive. They were better on an SSD, but would still almost always freeze and prompt Windows to ask if I wanted to shut the program down before snapping back into action.
Exit Theatre Mode
BattleTech is a slow-paced game across the board. It takes a long time to travel to missions, to wait for mech alterations, to heal injured mechwarriors, to watch your mechs walk across the field, to deal that last point of damage to an enemy, to load between literally any screen and the next, and so much more. I can appreciate a thoughtful strategy sim – not every game needs to be constant action – but if it didn’t take so long to do literally everything, the idea of playing more frequently would probably be less daunting to me than it is.
“ The battle camera will often be completely obscured by terrain, or miss showing the damage dealt entirely.
BattleTech is full of other rough edges, too, like the dynamic battle camera that takes over during an attack. It can create some cool cinematic moments, but your view will instead often be completely obscured by terrain, or the camera will take so long to pan over to where the damage is being dealt that you miss the result entirely and have no way to see exactly what happened because there’s no log and no way to replay a turn.
The worst of the issues I saw, however, was when the AI-controlled allies I was supposed to protect in an escort mission glitched out. Despite clearing every enemy and trying my hardest to guide them, they refused to move forward and I was forced to forfeit the mission altogether. Even though problems that serious were rare, the constant slew of camera issues, loading screen lockups, and missed damage results felt shockingly common and made BattleTech seem surprisingly unpolished.
Oh Captain, My Captain
Off the battlefield, BattleTech is more of a merc-company sim than a strategy game. Your ship has various stations you can visit, most of which are populated by colorful crew members with stories of their own. You can get new contracts, chat with your crew, upgrade your ship, alter and repair your mechs, or visit the barracks to assign experience points to upgrades for your mechwarriors. You can also look over the star map, and even customize the colors and name of your team at a cute little painting station in your quarters that throws back to BattleTech’s tabletop origins.
BattleTech Out-of-Combat Management Systems 10+ IMAGES Fullscreen Image Artboard 3 Copy Artboard 3 ESC 01 10 A screenshot from the out-of-combat sections of BattleTech's campaign, including mech customization and crew management. 01 10 A screenshot from the out-of-combat sections of BattleTech's campaign, including mech customization and crew management. BattleTech Out-of-Combat Management Systems Download Image Captions ESC
Just be prepared to read a lot. Most of the different activities on your ship are easy enough to understand, but BattleTech’s tutorials are thoroughly inelegant. While the basics of combat are taught through a tutorial mission, everything about your ship is learned by clicking through pages and pages of optional tutorial dialogue. Thankfully, it only took one readthrough to understand it all and I didn’t have much of a problem from that point on, but it undoubtedly makes for a rocky start to a campaign.
Once I got a new ship from an early story mission, speaking with the engineer to build new rooms and systems in it was one of my favorite things to manage. The upgrades come slow and cost money, but can speed up your mech repairs, increase Morale, or provide mechwarriors with a constant, slow drip of experience outside of combat, among other things. Certain upgrades require others, and there’s a surprisingly deep tree of perks to discover.
The names of those upgrades may seem superficial, but they can also unlock unique options in random dialogue pop-ups as you travel from system to system. These Oregon Trail-style moments ask you to make a choice as commander, whether it’s if you’ll rush to rescue a burning ship or just how to split the last of the coffee, and can have lasting effects on your crew while providing some enjoyable, bite-sized storytelling. At one point a fire broke out in my mech bay, but my Automated Systems ship upgrade stopped it – less stressfully, my crew once wanted to watch a movie together, which we were adorably able to host in a newly built lounge. However, these events can lose their charm once they start repeating.
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Customizing mechs is a whole minigame in itself as well, as you are free to swap out any equipment and weapons, only restricted by a mech’s max tonnage and the designated weapon-type hardpoints it has available. Despite their value, I actually found myself unlocking new mechs by scrapping destroyed enemies fairly regularly, which leaves room to experiment with different loadouts. It’s hard to completely overhaul a mech’s setup in a way that is better than the default, but it was still fun to make tweaks and upgrades when I could, such as deciding where I could risk lighter armor to free up weight for another jump jet or heat sink. It’s a system ripe for min-maxing, assuming your company has the time and money to commit to trying it.
“ It should tell you something about the delightfully dark BattleTech universe that total destruction of your forces is just another day, but bankruptcy is death.
Mechwarriors can be similarly upgraded, but not with nearly as much depth. Experience earned on missions can be spent to upgrade one of four skills; Gunnery, Piloting, Guts, and Tactics – which roughly relate to aim, melee/evasion, health/stability, and distance/sensors respectively. Upgrading gets more expensive the deeper into a skill you get, but you can also start unlocking special skills like Gunnery’s ability to aim at multiple targets. This let me specialize mechwarriors based on the type of mech they’d likely be piloting, but of course it also makes losing high-level mechwarriors sting.
Hunting for contracts is one of the areas of BattleTech that’s a less entertaining. You generally have two to four contracts offered to you at any given time, all of which are randomly generated based on the planet you are orbiting. It wasn’t uncommon for me to be handed a set of options I simply wasn’t interested in or flat-out couldn’t beat, forcing me to move to a new system. And while you can travel the star map any time you want, it can cost a massive amount of time and money.
It should tell you something about the delightfully dark BattleTech universe that total destruction of your forces is just another day, but bankruptcy is death. Every 30 days you have to pay your bills based on the upkeep of your ship and mechs, as well as the salaries of your mechwarriors. That means spending two or more weeks to go to a new system can be expensive if you don’t have a bit of a nest egg built up.
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That restriction would be fine if these random missions didn’t feel so wildly inconsistent. Even though you get a good description of the job, environment, and even a difficulty rating on a scale of one to five skulls, it’s hard to know what to expect until you actually get into the action. Early on, I had a one-and-a-half-skull mission that had nothing but a single mech and a single vehicle standing in my way, then immediately afterward got wrecked by a two-skull mission with a whopping eight enemy mechs.
Additionally, although there are different objectives like capturing a base, escorting a convoy, or simply blowing up all the enemies, they all seemed to quickly devolve into that last one. Enemy reinforcements would often arrive before the fighting even began, and the enemy AI pretty much tells it to work toward you and attack no matter what my mission goal may be. That makes many of these missions play out in a similar pattern, though BattleTech’s wide variety of interesting, hand-crafted battlefields can shake up your strategy a bit.
You Say You Want a Revolution
BattleTech’s story missions are nearly always more fun. You’re usually forced to complete a couple of random filler contracts before the next one unlocks, but the campaign offers a more consistent challenge (though still a very difficult one) with more interesting objectives. Instead of just “fight,” you can be fighting your way toward a ship you need to destroy, stopping APCs to defend a spaceport, or facing off against a special boss enemy.
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The story itself is full of exciting moments and tense twists as your mercenary outfit supports the Arano Restoration. Led by Kameo Arano, you aid in a highly political war as she wrestles to liberate a territory of space called the Aurigan Reach from the uncle that usurped it from her, and that struggle is cleverly tied into the missions themselves.
“ Your motivations are left entirely up to you, be it money, glory, honor, or whatever else you decide.
The top notch voice acting does a great job of breathing more life into Kamea and the other characters, with some compelling 2D cutscenes that look concept art come to life. I never found myself bored by the copious amount of written dialogue either, as I was invested in the story being told. BattleTech also gives you the occasional dialogue option that doesn’t influence anything, as far as I can tell, but let me more confidently roleplay as the commander I wanted to be.
Your motivations for helping Kamea are left entirely up to you to decide – be it money, glory, honor, or what have you – and that fantasy of being the type of commander you see yourself as is emphasized throughout. The initial character creator even lets you choose a pronoun instead of a gender, between ‘he’, ‘she’, and ‘they’. It’s a tiny thing that likely won’t impact the vast majority of people who play BattleTech, but casually inclusive options like this should still be commended whenever they appear.
I enjoyed that commander fantasy, but I wish BattleTech made me want to keep playing just for the sake of growing my mercenary company more than it does. The campaign was a lot of fun over the 35 hours it took me to complete it, and it was a pleasure to build up my ship and grow my team. But the slow pace means it takes a long time to grow that roster once the Arano Restoration stops shelling out the big bucks, and BattleTech can’t stand on its procedural contracts alone.
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There is also a fairly robust multiplayer PvP mode, complete with mech customization and lance loadouts split into four different classes. You can look through a server browser to find matches or create your own, letting you pick the map you’re on, whether to restrict mechs to their stock configurations, and more. It’s exactly the type of multiplayer fans of the tabletop game will likely appreciate, and gives you a more competitive opportunity to min-max strategies, but it also comes with all the same randomness problems that are inherent to BattleTech’s combat.
