8 votes

BattleTech is a more tactical, punishing view of mech battling

Tags: reviews

4 comments

  1. [3]
    cfabbro
    (edited )
    Link
    I'm probably a bit biased, being a kickstarter backer and big Harebrained Schemes fan, but I am really enjoying Battletech so far. There are some issues though, namely: The Tutorial is whisper...

    I'm probably a bit biased, being a kickstarter backer and big Harebrained Schemes fan, but I am really enjoying Battletech so far. There are some issues though, namely:

    • The Tutorial is whisper thin, especially with how complicated the game's systems are. I wound up having to read/watch a bunch of tutorials and guides on external sites to even figure out some of the most basic mechanics.
    • The UI leaves a lot to be desired especially with how information dense it is. And many critical pieces of information that you need to access constantly are hidden behind stupidly slow to activate mouse-over popups and right click menus.
    • Every mission takes way way way longer than it should, even with all the "cinematic" options disabled, because of how slow units move and because you have to wait for the previous unit movement to finish before you can order another unit's movement. It's so slow in fact that I wound up using the CheatEngine speed hack just so even basic side missions don't take 2+ hours to complete. Thankfully someone figured how to enable debug mode and you can just use that now though.
    • Unit customization is insanely complicated. Which, don't get me wrong, I love. But the problem is that Mechs, Weapons, Accessories, etc... have very little information in the game written about them and you can't really just experiment given how long missions take. So once again you need to look to external sites and wikis to figure out decent loadouts for your mechs.

    Other than that it's been amazing though. The voice acting is good, the story is fantastic and all the tactical combat mechanics (once you get a handle on them) are rock solid.

    3 votes
    1. [2]
      Deimos
      Link Parent
      Did you have any crashing issues? One of my friends was complaining that the game kept crashing at the end of missions, but before it saved. So he'd finish a mission, then have it crash and have...

      Did you have any crashing issues? One of my friends was complaining that the game kept crashing at the end of missions, but before it saved. So he'd finish a mission, then have it crash and have to do it over.

      2 votes
      1. cfabbro
        Link Parent
        I haven't yet, no... but that is a major complaint on /r/battletechgame so I don't doubt it's an issue for lots of people.

        I haven't yet, no... but that is a major complaint on /r/battletechgame so I don't doubt it's an issue for lots of people.

        1 vote
  2. MADAtron
    Link
    I agree with most of what the article mentions on the appeals of the game, and I'd add that it seems to be very well written from what I've seen so far (in about 30 hours of play). The article...

    I agree with most of what the article mentions on the appeals of the game, and I'd add that it seems to be very well written from what I've seen so far (in about 30 hours of play). The article also gives it a pretty
    big pass on some quirky things that tend to get on people's nerves, things that could have probably been identified and addressed with a bit more QA testing and development time.

    Some examples;

    • Adjusting armor in the mechbay can be finicky, since auto-maxing it out will adjust armor values to any integer on each component, but manually changing armor does it in multiples of 5
    • Running the game on Windows versions without standard codec packs (i.e. Windows N versions) didn't display any of the really neat semi-animated cutscenes until I installed the codecs manually.
    • The game menus and loading times slow down if you accumulate too many save games, and in-game actions seem to have additional delays if you accumulate too many in-game inventory items.

    So far I've been enjoying the game enough to ignore most of these issues, and I think pretty much all of those can be ironed out through patches. At this point, I probably wouldn't recommend it strongly to anyone that wasn't specifically interested in Battletech or an Xcom style tactical strategy game, but for those that are it'll be pretty satisfying.

    2 votes