So our friends at Hare Brained Schemes have spent the last two and half years putting together their Battletech game and it released last Tuesday to a mixture of trepidation, expectations of the highest caliber, and a smidge of controversy (which feels awfully artificially generated). So what is this game? Well, my limited (6ish hours in) experience is that it is one of the most elegant PC Games I’ve played in the last 5 years and the folks who built it have created something special, something that will be imitated by others in the near future. So what is Battletech? Settle in, i’ll try and make this brief.
A Thousand years from now, Humanity has made some impressive technological advancements and has spread across the stars. Surrounding Terra (Earth) in a 450 light year radius are the settled worlds that host human populations under a dozen different major factions. At one point, the Star League established one rule for all of humanity, and that rule was made possible by advanced military technology. The centerpiece of that technology was the Battlemech, a giant bipedal walking robot bristling with weapons, armor, and other advanced technology.
The Star League fell, and the various factions that had been its member states went to war to see who would succeed the fallen House Cameron as the ruling family of humanity. They’ve been fighting the Succession Wars for the last 300ish years to take the throne by force. Technology has eroded as they target major centers of science and technology to deny those resources to their enemies. Now the means to make war have been severely limited by these tactics and the 3rd Succession War is a slow moving low intensity conflict.
That’s basically where the story of Battletech starts for the PC game and you actually don’t need that primer to figure out what’s going on in the story portion of the game. The story is beautifully written, and the art is a strong combination of styles and ideas that fit the narrative and the aesthetics wonderfully. It bonds with the game’s subsystems very well and the whole thing is an amazing piece of software.
The game itself consists of two separate experiences that compliment each other amazingly well.The first experience is tactical level combat with a lance of mechs pursuing a wide variety of mission objectives on some very neat looking battlefields. You can choose which units you are taking into the field and who pilots which mechs. With a deep enough bench of both mechs and pilots, you can have the right tool for the right situation, if you can afford it.
The second experience that drives the game is an economic engine that fuels the war machine. You are mercenaries, which means that you are taking contracts to pay for your mechwarriors, pay the upkeep on the battlemechs and the dropship, and handle other things that come up. You can pick and choose from available contracts for the jobs you want to take, but there is a ticking clock in the form of a monthly finance meeting where you pay for everything.
These two experiences blend together in remarkable ways that keep me watching that clock to make sure i have enough cash in the bank to pay for the boys to go on another mission so we can get cash to pay for the...you can see how this cycle runs the game play experience and its amazing. Oh, and there’s a campaign going on to help you restore an exiled noble to her throne that serves as a narrative framework that you, the player can engage with to move the story forward.
It’s not the Battletech tabletop game. If you were looking for something that let you play the traditional tabletop experience, this is not that engine. This is something that looked at that as a starting point and went “what could we do to make this better, with 25 years of growth in the setting and modern computing power?” It crushes that idea and i am curious to see what the fine folks at Harebrained put together going forward for this. It’s an excellent experience and was worth the wait.
If you like this, go check it out. You can find it anywhere on the interwebs where you can buy computer games and is totally worth the price of admission. Buy your ticket, see the galaxy. Maybe put some holes in some giant robots, and help a lady take back her throne. Or not, the game seems like it will be willing to let you explore a lot of different directions.
That’s it for now, be sure to check out our daily ish Battletech update on Twitter to see how we’re doing with the Campaign. Game On, Game fans.
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