Review for Battletech. Game for PC, Steam, Mac and Linux, the video game was released on 24/04/2018
Battletech is a smart guy who doesn't try hard enough. It's a good title: it doesn't take itself too seriously, it paints the reality and storyline of the game universe with decent skill but, in the end, they are robots that take big cocks and laser beams in the face. Ours is a cold-made judgment, after almost a hundred hours spent on the game before writing, well aware of that feeling of euphoria that games of the genre can give you at first glance: a euphoria that then usually fades in total boredom , due to the repetitiveness of the missions and the paths to follow. We must admit that Battletech, unlike many other similar titles, manages to maintain an unusual freshness even after the ninetieth hour, which is certainly a big point in its favor.
But let's get into a little more detail: Battletech is a turn-based, strategy game based on hardcore science fiction (much more inspired by the first Star Wars trilogy and much less Nolan's Interstellar) immediately familiar to the player, regardless of the his knowledge of the universe told in the game. The campaign is interesting, as is its development and proposed missions: we are not the main actors of the inter-system disputes that plague the universe in the fourth millennium, we are mercenaries with a customizable origin that will then affect, even if in a slightly marginal way, our options and choices during the course of the story.
As mercenaries, of course, as our mentor will point out, we will be the coolest characters with the most potential. This thing we will initially know only he and we, however: during the campaign we will have to prove our worth to the many other factions thanks to different missions aimed at raising pennies (of which especially at the beginning we will have a desperate need), earning the trust of the factions and generally making our mercenary spear rise in value. This will allow us to have discounts in the various systems and to hire new, more qualified personnel.
The game manages to excite and involve, the music is noteworthy, the story is told by high quality hand made drawings, even in the battles there is a system of live cinematics that force the camera into close angles that often manage to make the fight very exciting in some salient moments, even if sometimes they do damage and do not allow you to follow the action as you would like, zooming in on the Mech while being hit by dozens of missiles from the unknown, as the game arbitrarily decided that it was more important to show the explosions rather than who caused them, a shareable choice for spectacularity but irritating for gameplay purposes .
Throughout the campaign we will find ourselves wandering the universe following the common thread of the main plot or, simply, in search of space credits. We will do it on our ship, in the company of a valid staff who has elected us as their supreme head and absolute dictator, so much so that during the missions they will speak, propose, suggest, but in the end they will always leave us the last decision on the actions to be taken. undertake.
With this ship we will be able to do many things: touring space is obviously one of these, enlisting Mechwarriors and buying more or less valuable pieces is another, but what we will do above all is to build, repair and modify our fantastic combat robots. Each Mech that the game offers can be customized in a rather intuitive and easy way, taking into account a few values that can radically change the use that will be made of it in battle.
The actual battles are the main topic of the game, given that the title itself dedicates a fair amount of space to them, even outside the aforementioned campaign, in single player and multiplayer skirmishes. They take place in different environments which, depending on the climate, interact differently with our strategy. Desert, lunar or Martian environments make it much more difficult for our Mechs to cool down and offer radioactive terrain that can shield us from enemy electronic pointers, for the price of an extra dose of heat; instead, there are, to give another example, alpine soils, cold and rich in vegetation that helps us, in part, to defend ourselves from blows.
Strategy is a decisive component: the AI is deliberately of different levels, to simulate the strategic skills of those we face. The thing works quite well when you meet mercenaries in trouble, a little less well when we have to face the "creme de la creme" of the galactic mechwarriors. Once our mercenary spear is deployed on the ground, it is possible for us to move quite freely until the first enemy is sighted: from that moment on the game becomes in effect a turn-based strategy based on the initiative in which to move first the lightest mechs and then gradually all up to the heaviest.
The user interface during the battles is done quite well: as in an augmented reality, it provides us with information on the type of terrain on which we are passing, on the status of our mech, on the enemy we are attacking and on our weapons. The rather serious flaw is that it does not always match perfectly with the reality represented in 3D: it happens quite often to try to take shelter behind a large rock or a tree and then discover that the computer is not repaired at all. After a short time - and I advise anyone to do the same - we began to ignore the graphical reality and to consider almost exclusively the information deducible from the interface.
Luck is an oddly large component of a strategic game. Each mech, in fact, has different components with different levels of armor and different weapons with different percentages of damage, with values from 15 to more than 100 depending on the weapon. This means that you could empty your entire missile arsenal on the opposing mech, with a hit rate of each missile of 95% and perhaps distribute more than 200 damage on its armor causing negligible damage, while at the same time your opponent with a laser 25 damage medium could hit you in the head and kill your mechwarrior. This luck factor, combined with the ability to save at each stage of the game turn, makes the game itself rather cumbersome. For the first few hours we decided never to save, accepting the death in battle of our wards and the destruction of our beloved mechs as a constituent part of the experience. When a mech explodes, another is made, when a mechwarrior dies, another is taken on. However, when we decided to try to save to try our hand in another experience, the playability of the title was affected: it becomes a stretch not just having to accept that your beautiful driver, on whom you have invested time and money, dies at the first try received from a less than half heavy mech (based on a true story). Hence the step to reloading whenever a probable shot fails is short.
In conclusion Battletech is a game that offers a lot to the gamer: the interactions between the mechs in the battles are exciting, the story is well made, the music is engaging and drags you into the right mood in a short time; however, it is a game that carries with it a heavy ballast of defects that degrade it from a masterpiece of the genre to a simple good game. The kinematics in battle, as mentioned above, are to be optimized (to be kind), after a couple of hours it is automatic to set them to the minimum (which can be decided in the options) and this is rather sad given that you give up a non-spectacular show. irrelevant.
Even the graphic reality that doesn't exactly match the interface is something fairly annoying, moreover the videogame experience is sometimes accompanied by crashes and it has happened that, in a couple of optional missions, the AI of the enemy mechs was completely bugged ( they didn't move throughout the battle until we attacked them). The arsenal of weapons to choose from is less varied than it should and the customization of the mech warriors too basic and too little specialized: this takes away some depth from the strategy.
Finally, the multiplayer structure leaves a lot to be desired, for the type of game it would have been possible to develop a 4vs4 system in the recent MOBA style, instead we find ourselves with the nostalgia effect lobby Warcraft 3.
So yes, a nice game, but one that needs to take care of some of its aspects that seem little developed. Who knows if in the future the publisher Paradox Interactive will somehow influence the market strategy of the game, adapting it more to the "care and DLC" system with which it spoils its titles, such as Stellaris and Europa Universalis 4. Implementing some content and structural changes (especially for multiplayer) Battletech could become yet another link that is now joining the world of strategists to the large videogame masses, for better or for worse.
► Battletech is a type game published by Paradox Interactive for PC, Steam, Mac and Linux, the video game was released on 24/04/2018
