So let's talk Battletech! It's brand new. Just dropped last week. And I've been a huge Battletech nerd since I snagged the boxed set from Barnes & Nobles when I was a teenager and made my sister play the first game with me so I could figure out the rules.
I just fired up the game last night and I haven't gotten very far into it yet but I have opinions and thoughts that I feel people thinking about snagging the game should hear.
I played the first mission and a 1v1 against a friend. Right now I'm impressed with how much it feels like the tabletop without all of the rules checking and arguments. I just felt like a board game in that you had to wait you have to play at the pace of the game and make decisions based on that turn based setting. This isn't a board game turned RTS. This is what we strategy nerds love. They've done a great job at translating the rules so they make sense in a digital format and you get the feedback you need based on your actions.
A few things still feel unbalanced (I'm mostly looking at 'Stability' here) and I have a LOT of learning to do through more campaign play but I really do think this is a great start on what could have been a huge mess.
I'm hopeful that the dev team is planning on adding more options to a frankly sparse multiplayer. Right now it's just 1v1 arena and that seems like a missed opportunity in a game based on something from the tabletop. Having alternate missions and more than 1v1 would allow for people to create campaign systems around the multiplayer. I know we've all become accustomed to the boring 'just kill them' multiplayer or so many other strategy games but this is turn based and we have the chance for something better.
The game does suffer from some issues in system requirements and what feels like an unoptimized code. I played it on a brand new mac book pro and had to turn every single setting down and it still felt a little slow and clunky. But thankfully that doesn't hinder your ability to play much in a turn based environment and will hopefully be addressed in patches moving forward.
I don't have a real suggestion as to whether you should stop reading and buy it yet but I'll be sure to update you all after I've had some time to finish out the campaign and to get some more multiplayer under my belt.
If you're a Battletech fanboy though, you should be supporting it just in the hopes this means more from the franchise moving forward.