![]() ![]() That’s impossible here: Everyone is going to get hit. In other tactics games, a perfect run might mean never letting your loyal soldiers take damage. And it’s only once you understand both modes of play that the game’s most obvious thematic and mechanical throughline becomes apparent: Everything in BattleTech comes down to attrition. This isn’t just window-dressing: You’re running a business as much as you are aiding a rebel army against an authoritarian regime, so the goal isn’t just to win these bloody battles, but to win them cleanly enough that you’re not spending all your money replacing broken equipment, and all your time waiting for wounded soldiers to return from months-long convalescence.īattleTech demands you to internalize your role as both lance leader and mercenary bookkeeper. So you and your band roam planet to planet, sending squads-called lances in the game’s terminology-out to do battle on behalf of different clients. There are two things you need to do: keep your unit of freelance mechwarriors paid and equipped by taking combat missions for hire, and then go fuck up those fascists. After a short intro sequence and somewhat longer series of tutorial missions, the situation is that you’re the leader of a mercenary mech company on the fringes of colonized space, and nursing a pretty severe grudge against a newly-installed authoritarian regime that deposed the former queen in a coup and murdered your mentor in the process. While BattleTech is obviously deeply informed by the lore of a thirty-year old franchise and its detailed setting, Harebrained doesn’t expect or require anyone be familiar with that history to enjoy this game. You also don’t need to keep a calculator and notepad next to you to play. It feels like the BattleTech board game in all the right ways, but battles unfold in less than an hour, rather than the 3-4 hour sessions the board game demanded. BattleTech takes dozens of different mech types and weapons, several different types of movement and attack, plus the crucial role of skilled pilots within those mechs, and puts them all inside a fast-paced tactics game. Crucially, however, they’ve left most-though not all-of the board game’s daunting granularity and detail in the past. With this new adaptation, Harebrained Schemes have made a game that captures both the lurid imaginary spectacle of mech combat, and its tactical suspense. No game ever really captured this aspect of BattleTech, that was so intrinsic to the board game and the universe it created. In novelizations and at the war table, a good MechWarrior knows when the time has come to commit everything they’ve got to knocking someone the fuck out, walking through point-blank weapons fire and absorbing whatever punishment their opposition can dish out just so they can smash an enormous metal limb into another mech and leave it shattered on the ground. It’s a vision fleshed-out across countless novelizations, massive sourcebooks and technical manuals, a pen-and-paper RPG, a dubious children’s cartoon, and several classic video games made with Activision and then Microsoft.īecause while the popular MechWarrior, MechAssault, and MechCommander games all focused on ranged, robotic combat, BattleTech (in both its fiction and within the design of the board game itself) is as much about hand-to-hand mecha combat as futuristic lasers and autocannons. Or at least it’s war as envisioned by Harebrained Schemes founder Jordan Weisman thirty-some years ago when he and his legendary tabletop gaming company, FASA, first released the BattleTech board game. This isn’t XCOM, where the point is to avoid getting hit while you surgically dismantle enemy squads piecemeal. They walk through showers of missile fire, shudder under the weight of cannon shot, get slashed to pieces by massive laser beams, and finally pummeled into the ground by other mechs’ massive metallic arms. And they don’t go down easily, like playing pieces that you take off the board after a good move. I’m talking about love here, and what I love about BattleTech is that it’s a game you feel in your gut, where you help topple a totalitarian regime by leaving a trail of broken and twisted mechs, as well as their dead pilots, littered across the stars. ![]() But those are justifications for an emotional reaction, not the reaction itself.
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