Battletech

"Once in love it's more like a habit
Guess that's what I need to feel like me"

FC Kahuna - Machine Says Yes


If you don't know what Battletech is, think of it as Into the Breach but with fewer Mothras and more pixels... or Titanfall except they're not called titans and you have to work pretty hard at falling... or Gundam if the giant robot suits were all senior citizens with bad hips. Anyway: giant robots. Good, clean fun.

Among the various tabletop games the likes of which have greatly influenced computer games (D&D, Warhammer, Magic: the Gathering, etc.) Battletech's influence is the hardest to estimate. The board game and its fiction spin-offs racked up a respectable base of followers almost immediately in the late '80s and '90s, but while it's stayed afloat over the decades it never quite racked up the popularity of other brand names. Thematically, it might be called the antithesis of Shadowrun: where the latter's marketed as a genre-blender of high fantasy, cyberpunk (itself already rather blended) and party-based roleplaying, Battletech seems to have stuck to its guns (which mostly consist of literal guns) as a low-SF space opera with Newtonian physics, centered on the idea of stomping around in fifty-ton bipedal war machines. It rather decisively staked out its niche market, to my admitted respect in an entertainment industry mostly defined by fads and trend-hopping. Implicitly, although most gamers have never played a 'Mech game, the nerds who go into game design quite likely have, and have been inspired by it.

In terms of computer games, most of us who've encountered Battletech did so through the Mechwarrior series. Mechwarrior 2 and Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries were both wildly popular for a brief time in the '90s, cresting both the advent of 3D graphics and that of graphics-based online gaming. Unfortunately, Mechwarrior 3 left most of us unsatisfied and #4 was mostly known as "better than #3" and the later Mechwarrior Online seemed to limp along with a few thousand users for a few years but mostly got "meh" reviews. The entire series was continually hampered (just as Baldur's Gate and other adaptations) by attempting to translate tile-based, turn-based tabletop tactics to real-time twitch-gaming. Even their most strategically interesting outgrowth, 1998's underappreciated Mech Commander, a squad tactical game, was still presented in real-time and rather limited in its interactivity.

Battletech is largely what Mech Commander should have been, retaining its managerial features while adding turns/tile mechanics and therefore making great use of the series' most interesting gimmick: locational damage. Each of a 'Mech's body parts has its own armor and structure rating, and not all need to be destroyed in order to disable it. Thus, much of combat consists of rotating and revolving around each other like game cocks to try punching through one particular flank on your enemy, which combined with line of sight, elevation, cover and other modifiers makes for some very satisfying feats of concentrated firepower. Though, notably, this does not prevent the intrusion of UTTER AND COMPLETE BULLSHIT!!!

I'm also pleasantly impressed with the unusual attention to physics in a non physics-based game. Your pilots get hurt if their mech gets knocked over, since yes, if you're sitting atop a 10m tall robot when it falls over, then you fall ten meters. Playing on airless planets imposes a penalty to dissipating heat from your weapons, due to low convection, and yes, amazingly enough machinery in the deathly cold vacuum of space can often be damaged faster by heat than by cold. You get an evasion bonus based on how far you've moved during a turn, something which will instantly beg the question "why the hell doesn't every TBS have this?" Even visually, mechs can be seen to accelerate and decelerate as they move... but that's also where you run into problems.

For all its gameplay features, most of your time in Battletech will be spent staring at that damn symbol, the loading symbol, and taking several minutes to load each mission map's only the tip of the iceberg. More aggravating are the terrible design decisions which could easily have been prevented with some playtesting feedback. For instance, trying to buy items or train your pilots means scrolling down through the list to each pilot or item. Fair enough... except the list resets each time, making you scroll again and again, only compounded by that damn loading symbol every time. What are you even loading? A dozen 100px 2D images, each with a paragraph's worth of text? Mechwarrior 2 could've done that faster!

More egregiously, in combat Battletech insists on freezing the interface while every single animation plays out, even for something as trivial as a mech falling over or some smoke billowing, or a chunk of an explosion bouncing around the ground until finally... gradually... painstakingly... settling to rest and immediately disappear. Even more infuriating, this is even true of audio chatter, because apparently nobody told the good folks at Harebrained that voiceovers are meant to be voiced OVER other events and not to pause the action.

Sure, I have other quibbles. It would've been great to field more than one lance late game, giving you more wiggle-room to include lighter and medium mechs instead of banking on sheer tonnage. Waypoints are suspiciously absent despite being a staple of strategy games and despite the Mechwarrior series featuring them extensively, and despite mechs in this game building up those all-important evasion points as they move, logically mandating the ability to "waste" some movement ("run in circles, scream and shout") before attacking. Is zig-zagging really an alien concept to the military masterminds of the 30-whateverth century? Plus, despite the UI being rather loaded with information, it would be nice to see an actual text combat log with what damage was applied where, or which mechs are capable of moving during which combat round, etc. Also, it seems a few corners were cut when it comes to map design. Somewhat glaringly, there is only one (1) lunar convoy intercept map (and it's been coming up more often than you'd think) and the convoy escort map with the stripmine operation routinely gets your APCs completely bugged out and unwilling to move. Including, might I add, in my very first mission after the tutorial!

The campaign mode is a bit over-fluffed as well with redundant filler missions and pointless exposition for obvious set-ups. You're completely railroaded in terms of your allies, with no warning that this will happen. Spoiler alert: I picked the Taurians and pirates to ally with from the start... guess who your main storyline ally has you constantly fighting. They should at least not fake their customers out with the pretense of choice. Also, while Battletech implemented a promising system of RPG-inspired background traits and dialogue option unlocks, they're used as pure fluff except for adding an occasional modifier to one of your pilots. Aesthetically, while models sport a laudable level of detail for a strategy game, and explosions certainly look funkily chunky, I would've been perfectly happy surrendering some of this detail for more variation in decor or wider arrays of map scale / diversity. (It was apparently only in an expansion pack that the game even got urban environments.) I'm also somewhat unimpressed by the music, which can occasionally sound engaging but gets somewhat jarring when it indulges in faux-latin marches better suited to fantasy games. Yes, I know technically these mech-warriors are all honorable space-samurai locked in dynastic struggles, but that's not what we see on screen and MW2:Mercs' memorable electronic soundtrack qualified as much more appropriate to its giant robot setting.


But, despite being willing to overlook all that, I'm writing this before finishing the main campaign and wondering if I'll even bother finishing it for one reason: I am sick of sitting around waiting for animations to complete! Which is sad, because underneath its particular brand of incompetence, Battletech is actually a pretty good game. It could have been a great one. It could even have revived multiplayer games... except that pointless waiting, once again, just happens to be one of the top detriments in PvP content, no matter the genre. I'll even declare myself impressed by Battletech's AI. Computer opponents will mercilessly focus fire onto your weakened mechs, angle their mechs to spread your damage out, run away when damaged or to brace themselves, make use of cover and high ground. If only every single one of those actions didn't take two seconds too long!

I've been deriving some enjoyment from my campaign so far, but it's mostly happening here:

The Mech Bay has options. So many beautiful options. This mean little melee ambusher has certainly been paying off lately. I also invested in a Banshee assault mech early on, slotted it with an AC20 and some machine guns for close-range heavy-hitting and used it as an RPG "tank" for lighter teammates. Bombardiers with low armor hiding behind terrain, direct-fire sniper setups, mid-range mid-weight grunts spamming rockets and laz0rz, scouts with harasser weaponry or suicidal short-range setups for one-time usage. What more do you want? Because you can probably get it. It's been a great deal of fun putting together dream teams, but still... one can't entirely praise a tactical squad game by saying its managerial side works better.

I could see, a year or two from now, reinstalling Battletech when I have a new computer and it's received some more patches to streamline its resource loading and cut some of its redundant pop-up notifications and trim its animation lengths. For now, two years after release, it's just frustrating to see what could have been the pinnacle of its niche so hopelessly undercut by inexcusably amateurish implementation of its most basic gameplay features.