Recent reviews by Howihu

This is a great game for its value, a faithful adaption of the tabletop version and the older games with improvements and some addition to the gameplay. Old fans of this title will be pleased and it is a must buy for them. Newer fans might encounter a steep learning curve as the tutorial does very little to help them out. Experienced tabletop players or those who played the older game will have no trouble adjusting to the game.

The AI isn't very good, and the difficulty is raised by improving their firepower and their numbers. For me this is ok, but others out there might not like it.

Customizing your Lance (your unit) is a fulfilling experience as it rekindled my love for the older games. Finding the right balace of firepower, durability, maneuverability, heat management, and utility for your Lance can take up hours of your time and made me feel nostalgic. The cherry on top is customizing your mech colors shows you a miniature with some table top paints, nice added touch to the fans, I love it.

Pilot attributes are also noteworthy as combining a mechwarrior with a specific mech can give you greater efficiency and effectiveness in battle, and finding the right pilot for the right mech can be very fulfilling, as pilots have some skills that can help out in battle, it isnt too complicated but its fun.

Which brings me to the cinematics and the cutscenes. The cinematics aren't a pixel bomb of Micheal Bay levels of CGI bonanza, they are simplified watercolored paintings with some voice acting. This isn't a bad thing for me, and it felt like a visual novel in some way. Very subtle and artistic in my honest opinion. It could have been due to the fact of the limited budget this game had in production, but it was done well in my book. Voice acting was good when it was there, but sometimes the characters just stopped speaking and would convey the story through texts. It is game breaking, but I would have preferred to have all conversations in speech rather then in text. I feel there was a missed opportunity in the lore, the superb voice acting could have put more emphasis on the world of battletech which could have taken fans both new and old to totally different experience that transcends the novels. Battletech isn't just a game about fighting beat em up robots against the other, it is more then that, it is a story driven world filled world filled with rich characters and factions, and putting it all in text i felt was a wasted chance to bring more people into this world. For example, emphasis on the power of Lostech and the Star League wasn't conveyed well through the story, it did in gameplay though.

This game assumes that you have a knowledge on the background of the factions, which is ok for the older fans, but does little to expand its fanbase. Which is a shame because people always compare this game to Xcom, and the story could really set this game apart from similar titles, it has the potential to do so.

Another thing to note is that this game is a grindfest, you need to consistently take on missions to salvage and complete your mech collection and to keep your merc company afloat, whether or not this is a good thing is up to you, personally I enjoyed the grind, as making a decent buck while updating my mech collection gave me a very satisfied feeling. I was surprised that I spent more then 40 hours in this game, as the time passed me by I did not realize the time I was investing in this game.

My gripe with this game however is the unskipable traveling cinematics, traveling from one system to another which can take up to 4-8 minutes of you just staring at your computer screen waiting for things to happen. Dont get me wrong the cinematics of docking and entering an atmosphere is thrilling and captivating the first time you see it, but after repeating the same thing 10 times in a row I found myself annoyed. Perhaps the introduction of skipping through time would be a welcome addition to the game.

Another problem I had was interface in the shops and the mech customization. You had to hover over items and wait a few seconds for the pertinent information to pop up, why not just add all the information to the side when clicking on the items? Buying multiple items is also a pain, as you have no option to buy in bulk and have to click and purchase the same thing multiple times. Just a minor feedback.

Battletech is one of the most underrated franchises out there and deserves attention every now and then, I hope more games will be released. The lore is rich and second to none, the gameplay is as good as it gets, perhaps a few adjustments here and there would vastly improve this game.

An idea for a DLC though, why not put the rise and fall of the Star League? Put great voice actors in, all the fancy Lostech, and put a good script in, I'd buy that since it puts emphasis on the ultimate point of the battletech lore, civilization falls when technology vastly improves but the populace remains stagnant in demeanor.

Wish I could review the game itself but I can't. My logs would show that I played this game for 30+ minutes but those 30 minutes were used to try and open the game but i kept getting denied access.

After reinstalling, verifying, disabling my anti virus, opening as admin, and even deleting .ddl files and verifying, nothing worked, so I asked for support from steam but they could not give any and I had to go to ubisoft, after 5 days I got no response, chat support was always unavailable.

I didn't expect to be ignored, but I was. In the first place, a paying customer should not have to go through all the trouble I did, but I tried to resolve the issues patiently and to no avail.

Sadly, this will be my first ever negative review for a game, and it was not because I didn't like the game, but rather because I never got the chance of playing it.

The real hassle now is that my refund had to be in steam credit since my credit card bills were due and had to be paid.

Highly recommend this game, just finished a set of survivors in less than 5 hours. Great replayability and an immersive experience. Buy it!