BattleTech - Review @PC Gamer

Remove all ads!

A BattleTech review on PC Gamer:

​

BattleTech review

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.

[...]

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.

Score: 85/100