#BATTLETECH REVIEW SERIES#

You’re responsible for managing your roster of MechWarriors, ‘Mechs, finances, contracts, morale and reputation with potential employers. I’ll avoid story spoilers here after a few scene-setting ‘tutorial’ missions, your custom-created pilot takes the role of commanding a mercenary company. Put a heavy autocannon round through the cockpit window and BAM! - there goes the ‘meat’. All that weaponry and armour comes at a price these walking tanks have to manage the heat build-up of firing and running their fusion-powered engines - and their human pilots are still pretty squishy. That comparison really doesn’t do justice to the sort of thing we’re dealing with here, though BattleMechs are eight to fourteen metres tall and the heaviest weigh a hundred tonnes, packing enough armament to level a city block. Your mobile base of operations for much of the game. If you’re running really short of comparisons, think XCOM, Xenonauts or the like. If you’re not familiar with tabletop wargaming, or the franchise, this takes the form of turn-based tactical strategy. At its core, it’s a fairly faithful recreation of the original tabletop rules.

I also won’t cover the multiplayer component of the game here as I’m yet to try it, and it’s not the main focus of what HBS created.Īs an heir to this legacy, I’ll say it straight up - BATTLETECH does not disappoint.

#BATTLETECH REVIEW SERIES#

You might have heard of them - MechCommander and the MechWarrior series are perhaps the best known.Ī bit of a personal disclaimer - I grew up playing MechCommander (FASA/Microprose, 1998) and have been in love with the universe ever since. Whilst the game might be new, the setting is not - the BattleTech universe has been in constant development as a hard sci-fi setting since the 1980s and has played host to the eponymous tabletop wargame, a D&D-style RPG around ninety-or-so published books and a host of video games. This is the setting of Harebrained Studios’ (HBS) new game, BATTLETECH. The BattleMech is the king of the battlefield. Through this chaotic future, the BattleMech strides as a master of war and their pilots ride like knights.

Once common technologies are now LosTech, and the Succession Wars have ravaged the Inner Sphere, killing billions and reducing some worlds to little more than ash or medieval fiefdoms. As all empires do, the Star League fell to a bloody civil war and its greatest general escaped with its defence forces into the Deep Periphery, past the edge of known space. Almost a thousand years ago, humanity first took to interstellar travel, courtesy of the Kearney-Fuchida jump drive.Įxpansion amongst the stars followed, and four great houses rose to power within the greatest entity in history - the Star League.

Battletech review