First, let’s focus on what BattleTech does well, because there is a lot of it.
Developers Harebrained have, to a certain degree, played it safe with BattleTech: if you’re unfamiliar with the universe there are certain mechanics that may come as a surprise - such as putting together pieces of destroyed enemy machines being your only realistic method of acquiring new BattleMechs - but at first glance it’s exactly the sort of game you’d expect them to produce when given $2.8 million of Kickstarter funding to make a tactical strategy game set in the BattleTech universe.Ī closer inspection made over several dozen hours of gameplay eventually reveals more than a few cracks in the facade, but we’ll get to those in good time. Once you’ve accepted a contract and arrived at the designated location, you drop onto a planet surface with a single lance of four ‘Mechs to eliminate any opposition in a turn-based tactics layer. There’s the DropShip layer, where you hire and level up MechWarriors, buy and sell equipment, bolt specific selections of guns onto your ‘mechs so that they can better fulfil their chosen role in combat, and decide what your next contract is going to be. The set-up is going to be very familiar if you’ve played any of the games I mentioned above, with the gameplay split into two layers.
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The original MechWarrior used it as a base, MechWarriors 2 and 4 both had expandalones that contextualised their mech-driving laser-shooting gameplay with the ins and outs of managing your own mercenary lance of MechWarriors, and the MechCommander series did the same for its small-scale RTS core.Īs BattleTech is the first entry in the series since 2013’s MechWarrior Online (which I enjoyed on launch, but which from the sound of things has not had a smooth ride since), and since it’s supposed to represent a return to the series’ more cerebral tabletop roots, it’s only appropriate that it too embraces the mercenary company idea with open arms. If there’s one franchise that’s consistently stuck with the idea throughout its existence, however, it’s BattleTech’s neo-feudal giant robot brawl ‘em up universe, where the galaxy is divided into warring states run by noble houses who are all looking for a good mercenary company to solve their problems.
There’s also the much more recent Battle Brothers, which was the best game released last year and which tragically didn’t do well enough to convince the developers to stick with it post-launch. There’s Jagged Alliance, there’s Mercenaries: Playground Of Destruction (which was a GTA-alike but also handily demonstrated how the concept can be applied to just about anything) and there’s a few Japanese tactics games 2.
Given that running your own fictional mercenary company is such a good fit, it’s a little baffling to me that there are so few examples of it in the wild - and most of those are decades old. Running a mercenary company fits the tactical strategy genre in particular like a glove: you’ve got strategic-level movement, economy management, hiring and firing personnel and scrounging together decent equipment built straight into the idea without even having to lift a single design-related finger. Not a real mercenary company, whose historical (and modern) goal has been to do as little fighting as possible while getting paid as much money as possible, often by taking bribes from the opponent not to fight 1, but one set in a fantasy or sci-fi universe where there’s already a certain amount of suspension of disbelief going on, and it’s not that much more of a stretch to believe that in this world a mercenary would be willing to die to honour the terms of their contract. I’ve always thought that the mercenary company concept is a perfect one on which to base a game. BattleTech is the other mercenary management game I’ve always wanted.