I was so excited when this game came out last month! I'm a big fan of MechWarrior game and been playing most of its games including MechWarrior Online until there were less and less players playing it and I stopped. MechWarrior is one of the best mech or robot game and you got to pilot mech robots in it. When MechWarrior was released many years ago, it was probably one of its kind multiplayer games. With MechWarriors all over the world playing together, battling each other in two team versus format set in a very big maps.
But according some information, BattleTech has no relation to MechWarrior online game. It's developed based on a board game with the same name. Even so, there are many similar elements they shared. If according to the history of MechWarrior games, it was developed based on BattleTech board game as well. So it's a bit confusing here but that's ok, not a very important part now.
This BattleTech is a totally different game from MechWarrior or MechWarrior Online games. Here you will play a skirmish, tactical, turn-based strategy game and the biggest difference of all is that you won't be piloting a battlemech or mech from the inside of it. It will be in a third person view and you will instruct those MechWarriors and their mechs as a commander. It's more of a mercenaries kind of play where you have to jobs to get money.
Even so, they still have some of the characteristics of MechWarrior game. You can customized the mech like you did in MechWarrior Online but you can't get mech easily. I mean you cannot simply buy the battlemech, you have to find its parts from the salvage when you completed the mission, quest or job. There are three of them, for each mech and if you got all three you will need to assemble it. Another way to get the mech is to buy all three parts from the store at the planet but it can be very costly. The weapons and the mech is still the same but maybe with a bit of different look. The best part is, after assembling it, you have fit it with all the weapons and equipment to make a battle-ready mech. This part can take a long time especially if you enjoy customizing the mechs. But, here in BattleTech, anything you do to the mech will require time to be completed, not instantly.
There are two modes of the game that you can play, either campaign or skirmish. In campaign you will play this game as your career. You will started with a scene of trying to rescue or escorting Kamea of House Arano, the High Lady of The Aurigan Reach, the righteous heir to the Aurigan's throne, to her coronation day but something bad happened. She got betrayed by his uncle and his sister who took over the throne from her. During the first part of the campaign, you will fight alongside her and your trainer on your way there but was intercepted by mechs commanded by her sister. The three of you end up trying to get to safety and to get her to the dropsip which is supposed to get to escape the planet. But... things goes very bad, you got your mech sabotaged by his sister and your trainer asked you to eject and run away. While he stayed behind to fend off the attack to make sure Kamea take off safely and keep you safe. He died in the end and Kamea's dropship got blew up while ascending to the space.
You woke up a few moment later in a ship of some space mercenary who rescued you and your mech. They will take you in and you join them in their quest. You can watch my first play video at the end of this post to know more about the first part of the campaign. It was the first 1 hour play of this game, almost one hour that is.
There years later, that's when your real life of MechWarrior mercenary started. You've been made a commander of that mercenary company due to your experience and reputation. Your job is to keep that company alive because it is currently drenched deep in debts and you have to find and do missions to get money to pay your massive loan as well as to fund your operations. Each MechWarrior you hire, you will have to pay their salary and all your battlemechs you have in your hanger will incurred maintenance cost. So if there's any mech that you don't need, it's better to transfer them to the storage to avoid unnecessary spending because money is tight in this game.
Your biggest challenge is keep the money coming and it's very difficult. I'll explain why later on. Each job that you do, you will have to negotiate either to have it pay in full or pay less but you'll get some items from the salvage. If you choose to have full pay you won't get to choose any items that your client salvage from the mission area and if you choose to take all the items, you will get very minimal pay. The choice is yours and it can be tricky especially in the early part of the game because you need money and you also need free items like mech parts, weapons and equipment. To make it harder for you to decide, the choices you make between the pay and the salvage will also affect how much reputation points you will get from each mission. The reputation points is need to increase you reputation level in the MechWarrior Reputation Board in which it will determine what level of MechWarrior you can hire in the planet's hiring hall, among other thing. So this game is not something that you can just go and shoot at your enemy, there's a lot of things to think about.
Every time you go on a mission or doing the job, your MechWarriors and their mechs can get injured and damaged from the battle. This is when it gets very challenging and very difficult. Injured MechWarrior will be out of action for a period of time, probably recovering and recuperating from the injury. How long the duration that he will be out, will depends on how bad the injury is and your medical points. The worse the injury and the lower your medical points is, the longer that MechWarrior will be out and cannot go on a mission. Same goes to the damaged mech. You will need to repair it and if it have some structure and weapon damage, you will have to replace the, by refitting it with the new weapons and equipment. This will require money which they call C-bills in this game and it's very expensive! Especially if the damage is very bad.
It also depends of the type of mech, the heavier the mech the more money you need to repair it. That's not the worst part, the worst part is repairing and refitting will require time to complete and the duration will depends on your company's mechtech point. The more mechtech points you have the shorter time it will take. For starter you will only have one bay for repairing and refitting all your mechs so if you have multiple mechs to be repaired they will be put on queue and this will make it longer to get all your mech to be able to fight again. Because of this, you will have to try hard to keep your MechWarrior and their mech survive with minimal injury and damage in each mission and that's is not an easy thing. In fact it is the hardest thing to do in this game. Mission have their level of difficulty. It's recommended that you do all the low level missions that you can fin first before you started to do priority missions. This is to get enough money to fund your operations, to repair your mech and to buy whatever weapons or equipment you need to replace the damaged ones when doing missions with higher level of difficulties. This is also to make sure that your MechWarriors gain a lot of experience points to upgrade their skills to fare better in batlle.
When you starting out, you will be given a pretty decent MechWarriors and mechs. They're good to keep your business going for as long as you keep them alive and well. You don't have to spent money to hire MechWarrior or to buy mech. Getting one of your Mechwarrior killed means that you will have to hire a new one and this is actually not good because each time your Mechwarrior is involve in a successful mission, they will gain experience points which you can use to upgrade their skills and abilities. So if your seasoned and highly experienced Mechwarrior got kill and you need to hire a new one, you lose so much and have to start over again getting the new one enough points for upgrade. This is not good as move further into the game because at some points your MechWarrior will surely got injured and will be out of action for a long time. If that happened to all of your MechWarriors, you will not be able to do missions for a long time and your funds will be depleted and you can go bankrupt! So the tip is, hire new MechWarrior to add to your army as you go on and not to replace any. It's very costly.
That bring us to the core ability in playing this game, understanding the mech, weapons, equipment and the tactical part of the battle. No, you can't just go into the battlefield and rush to the front to kill all the enemies, you'll get your mech and MechWarrior killed doing that. The condition and the terrain of the planet you're battling on will also affect your mech in one way or another, most of it in an adverse ways but some in good ways. It might sounds complicated but that is what being a MechWarrior is all about.
When you visited any planet in the system, you will be able to do three things. First, you can go on a mission available in that planet, secondly you can buy weapons, equipment and mech parts from the planet's store and lastly you can hire available MechWarrior there if you need to. Each planet have their own level of challenge for missions available there. This is like a difficulty level of the mission, the higher the challenge the higher the reward. When you first started you only have access to four planets because of the condition from the bank of your loan that restricted your movement. These four planets are considered as low level and most of the items you find there are common. Same goes with the mission, most of them are low pay mission but it's enough to fund your monthly operation and salary costs.
As you struggling trying to fund your company doing all sorts of missions, there will be priority missions that is related to the main story line. It's the campaign mode after all. The best part of these priority mission is, the pay is hefty and you don't have to negotiate choosing between money or salvages, it give you both. But, this mission mostly longer than ordinary mission and can be very difficult. I won't want to spoil this part too much because you will be playing the main story of the game here and it's very interesting!
In BattleTech universe there four categories of battlemechs, light, medium, heavy and assault, but it's not known yet how many mechs are there for us to find in this game. Each category and type of mech have their own advantages and disadvantages. For example, light mech can move further and faster but it doesn't have much weapon slots and lower tonnage. While heavy mech have more weapon slots and higher tonnage but will move slower. Each category and type of mech also have their own role such as skirmisher, cavalry, fire support, brawler and scout. Some of those mechs have dual roles.
As for weapons, there are many types of it in this game such as long range missile, laser, sniper, machine gun and many more. Not all mech can be fitted with all the weapons, they have slots for the type of weapon it can carry and the slots are limited. Each mech also have their own limit of weight they can carry. This weight or tonnage will also include the armor of your mech as well as other equipment like heat sinks and jump jets. Each weapon and equipment comes with their own weight and required slots. Weapons also have their own number of heat level they generate. Everything you fit into your mech will affect the six characteristics it have such as movement, heat efficiency, average range, firepower, durability and melee. Even fitting your mech can be tricky, you cannot put everything you want in it but rather putting what you need for the battle. Sometime the mech might have a lot of slots for LRM or long range missile but you also need to put heat sink to compensate the heat that LRM will generate from firing it. Your mech can get overheat and if it does, it will caused structural damage and will also cause your mech to shut down in the middle of a battle.
The success of the battle you face in this game will depends on a lot of things and I recommend that you always bring 4 mechs and MechWarriors to the battlefield. Bringing less than that will make it difficult for your team for sure. I've tried to use three mechs (because I have other mechs on repair) for a priority mission and I ended up replay the mission from the start again because I got two of my mechs and MechWarrios killed. It cost me too much that I almost went bankrupt.
In this game you have the choice to fight for honor or money, the choice is yours but let me remind you so that you won't regret playing this game, playing for honor will make this game more difficult on a lot of things. You need money and weapons, if you cannot get enough money to fund your company, you'll go bankrupt. I'm not sure what will happened if you bankrupt, I haven't face that yet. But if honor is what you seek, by all means, fight for honor... LOL!
That's pretty much all about the basics and a little bit the advance part of this game. It's an interesting and fun to play game. It's one of a kind and there are many things to do here apart from shooting enemies on the battlefield. You basically managing a space robot mercenary company that you can call you own, while trying to help Kamea to get back her throne and restore order to the region. I hope that doesn't spoil anything.... LOL!
Anyway, this game is a must play indie game for this year. I totally recommended it especially for those fans of turn-based strategy game who have been waiting for something to play for a long time. I'm pretty sure the last turn-based strategy game that you played was XCOM or/and Civilization, right? So this might feed your cravings for such game.
You can get it in Steam for less than $20 and from the information I read, the developer will expand this game with many more contents and improvements. They already have plans to add an expansion for the story/campaign and also adding a multiplayer mode. Although I'm kind of skeptical on how the multiplayer play will be but I keep my hope high.
So that's it folks. If my review here enticed and tickled you interest and curiosity on this game, go get it and play it. You won't regret it for sure. I don't have much complain about it so far, only the loading time is a bit long and there's no feature to name you save files, it's named automatically. Apart from that, I enjoy this game so much. I mean it's considered as an indie game but it bring so much fun like it is a triple A tittle.
Have fun and game on!
