Dekker has fallen over. His 30-metre-tall mech is prone at a desert crossroads, flanked on two sides by canyon walls that do not—it turns out—prevent him from being shelled by artillery. I’d sent him in because his mech is the most armoured: his job was to tie up enemy firepower while my quicker mechs flanked through a lowland forest to the south.
I’m commanding a lance—a squad of four mechs—featuring designs and loadouts that’ll be familiar if you’ve ever played a MechWarrior game. BattleTech pulls the series back to its tabletop roots, focusing on strategic combat between mercenary outfits who dip in and out of star-spanning future wars to turn a profit. In this specific instance, I’ve been tasked with blowing up valuable buildings in two separate locations. As Dekker and another heavy mech approach the gates head-on, I’ve set up a flanking strike to eliminate the power generator sustaining the base’s turrets. At least, that’s the plan.
A bit of faulty reconnaissance on my part means that I didn’t realise that the enemy base defences don’t need line of sight to open up on my heaviest mech. Similarly, while years of MechWarrior games have left me wise to the dangers of overheating, I didn’t consider stability. Dekker’s armour repels the worst of the missiles that rain down on him from the far side of the hill, but their explosive impact is enough to send him off balance and, ultimately, crashing down to the floor.
It’ll take a two-part plan to save him. In the forest to the south, my two flanking mechs really need to take out that power generator. And Dekker’s wingmate—no small mech herself—needs to take out the enemy mech that is acting as a spotter for that distant artillery. Neither of these things go quite to plan.
Although you have a degree of real-time control over your mechs as they explore the battlefield, contact with an enemy causes the game to shift into a turn-based system based on each pilot’s initiative. In each phase of the fight you can choose a mech to activate and perform a move action followed by an attack. It’s a little like XCOM, but much more granular in a way that feels like a tabletop game. I choose one of my flanking mechs and instruct her to use her jump jets to reach a higher vantage point, risking her heat sinks in order to take the shot that might save Dekker. She opens up her medium lasers on the entirely stationary, very large generator—and misses.
Dekker takes another round of fire and loses his mech s left arm. He stands and opens fire with all of his remaining weaponry, tearing chunks out of the enemy walker but overheating in the process.
Dekker takes another round of fire and loses his mech’s left arm. He stands and opens fire with all of his remaining weaponry, tearing chunks out of the enemy walker but overheating in the process. The next round of artillery fire incapacitates him—he has a chance to crawl away from the wreckage alive, but I won’t find out until the end of the mission (had I chosen to eject him rather than attack, I could’ve ensured his survival).
In response, Dekker’s wingmate charges the enemy mech and performs a melee attack—a first for a BattleTech game. Mechs don’t have melee weapons, and there’s nothing elegant about ramming them into each other—this is a sprinting shoulder-charge that smashes catastrophically into the enemy. I get lucky—the enemy pilot is killed, and their mech collapses. The artillery opens up again, but it won’t get to fire after that. I move another mech into a flanking position, and this time they can hit the broad side of a power generator.
There’s loads to like about BattleTech as a purely tactical game: you’ve got a lot of control over your squad’s positioning and weapon options, and achieving an advantageous position means carefully paying attention to altitude, heat and, yes, stability. This single combat encounter is a straightforward example of the drama that the game generates on the fly. Later on, I discover the thrill of using jump jets to deliver fatal drop attacks on tanks like an expensive metal Mario, and conduct the rest of the mission in this manner.
It’s the broader strategic layer that has me excited for BattleTech, however. The events of this mission are shaped by—and shape—a much bigger and more open-ended attempt to earn a dime as a mech-commanding space mercenary. For example: while Dekker-the-pilot was unable to escape the burning wreck of his mech, the mech itself was not completely unsalvageable. Yet the specific damage it took will need repairing, and if there were any expensive guns bolted to that left arm—well, it’s gone. That’s a potentially expensive loss that’ll need accounting for when I decide to take on my next mission. Also, you know, Dekker’s dead, and that’ll probably have an impact on morale.
Each of your pilots has a randomly-generated personal history, which influences their outlook and connections.
Back on the ship (initially a small Leopard-class dropship, later a massive upgradable hulk called the Argo) there are loads of decisions to make. Each of your pilots has a randomly-generated personal history, which influences their outlook and connections. You’ve got your own baggage too—you create your main character through a questionnaire at the beginning of the game that reminds me a little of the Mount & Blade series.
These factors influence the types of missions that will be made available to you beyond the confines of the story-led critical path. When you take on a mission, you can choose to emphasise payment, salvage rights, or forego either to make factions like you more. Salvage rights are deliciously specific, too—what you get depends on the outcome of the battle that is subsequently fought, so if you’ve chosen to take your payment in the form of scrap then you’d better be sure that you only blow the bits off enemy mechs that you don’t want to keep.
You might choose to take missions in tundras or wetlands where the environment can be used to keep your mechs cool and able to sustain their firepower for longer, or head to the desert with a more lightly-armed contingent that can exploit the temperature to their own advantage. You might try to curry favour with one of the great houses of the BattleTech universe, or slum it with pirates and steer clear of interplanetary war.
You’ve got loads of freedom to refit each mech to your specific needs, but these changes take up both money and time. A week-long refit will be broken down into subtasks, and if you choose to interrupt work to get a mech into the field in a hurry you may find that your engineers have finished fitting the new gun but not, say, loaded its ammo. As time passes you’ll occasionally be presented with shipboard events, mini choose-your-own-adventure digressions with consequences for morale. And morale, in turn, influences your pilots’ performance in battle.
There’s a lot of XCOM to this structure, but unlike XCOM the stakes in BattleTech aren’t quite as high. Certainly your employers would like you to succeed, but you’re not trying to save the world—you’re trying to make a living. Taking heroic risks (like, for example, wandering your biggest mech unsupported into the line of fire) isn’t always the right call. To reflect this, missions don’t have a straightforward success or failure state: if you choose to retreat from a mission with only half your objectives completed, that’s not necessarily an outright disaster. Depending on exactly what you managed to achieve, you may come away with partial payment and a slight knock to your reputation but—crucially—a ship full of pilots who are still alive and mechs that don’t need expensive repairs, which is its own form of success.
This feels like underexplored space for this type of game. I’m really taken with the idea of a campaign system that discourages save-scumming by giving you more freedom to make the best of a bad situation. And the detailed links between BattleTech’s galaxy-spanning ‘sim game’ and on-the-ground combat are something I’d like to see much more of—being a good space-war businessperson isn’t just a matter of making the right macro-scale decisions, but of optimising your efficiency on the battlefield, too. There’s loads of potential for interesting stories to come from these systems—and, yes, like XCOM, you can rename all of your pilots after your mates. And apologise to them in person when your bad decisions result in them falling over and exploding.
Whether you enjoy turn based games or a good RTS, 2018 will present some interesting options. Naturally, the brace of current 4X games like Civilization 6, Stellaris and Endless Space 2 will continue to receive expansions and updates throughout the year, but there are a bunch of new titles to look forward to besides. Here are the ones we're most excited about, and a few that we can expect to see appearing in 2019 and beyond.
Developer: Mode 7 | Release date: 2018 | Link: Official site
Frozen Synapse was a sleek, streamlined tactical squad combat game released in 2011. A tight variety of weapon types and smart asynchronous multiplayer helped it to stand out, now the sequel plans to couch these combat encounters in a procedurally generated city populated by embattled corporations. As in the original game, you give orders to your neon operatives in five second bursts by drawing out pathing and aiming instructions, then you press 'go' and watch your orders play out. The core combat is proven, but we'll have to see how the addition of an overworld relic-hunting metagame builds on those fine foundations. The digitised cut-glass cities already look gorgeous.
Developer: The Creative Assembly | Release date: 2018 | Link: Official site
Total War fans waiting for a return to history could be in for a treat as The Creative Assembly debut the "Saga" series. It's a sizeable Total War game with a much tighter focus on a particular flashpoint in history, namely the aftermath of Alfred the Great's victory against the Vikings at the battle of Edington. Three factions are poised to fight for control of the British isles, but the country is rendered at a much greater scale than we've seen before in a Total War. Take a look at the map at the end of the video below and you can see how the game intends to zoom in and explore the territory in detail.
Developer: Harebrained Schemes | Release date: Early 2018 | Link: Official site
We like everything we've seen so far of this turn based mech combat game. You spend half of your time engaging enemies with a squad of highly customisable mechs, and half managing your mercenary organisation in a tough universe where betrayal is a constant risk. Learn more in our interview at the PC Gaming Show, where we learned more about your home base and the strategic metagame that binds your missions together. BattleTech/MechWarrior creator Jordan Weisman is onboard, so long-term fans of the BattleTech universe can expect a detailed and authentic take on the universe.
Developer: Subset Games | Release date: TBA | Link: Official site
It is a good year to be a mech fan. Into the Breach, from the developers of FTL, doesn't have an official release date yet even though from what we've played it could come out tomorrow and be brilliant. It's a turn based tactical combat game set over a tightly limited turn count. In each encounter you have to do is survive an onslaught of giant creatures burrowing up from beneath the planet's surface, but where many strategy games rely on dice rolls and happenstance to generate drama and tactical dilemmas, Into the Breath shows you everything. You know exactly how and where each enemy is going to strike next, and how much damage they will do. Then it's up to you to craft a perfect series of attacks to push enemies around the battlefield and blow them up for sweet XP.
Developer: Snapshot Games | Release date: 2018 | Link: Official site
The creator of the original X-Com, Julian Gollop, is returning to the genre he helped create with an exciting modern take on the formula. Bodypart targeting, mutating enemies and a grittier look all help separate Phoenix Point from Firaxis' recent XCOM reboots. Soldiers will have willpower and endurance stats to model how stressed they feel when they get shot by alien crabs with miniguns for arms, and there are multiple human factions with their own tech preferences. Of course you can expect to repurpose crab tech for your own purposes, in true X-Com fashion.
Developer: Microsoft | Release date: Early 2018 | Link: Official site
This could be a dream remaster of one of the best loved PC series ever. The art has been updated to look good at modern resolutions, the population cap has been increased, you can zoom out, pathfinding has been adjusted, you can attack-move, there's an "enhanced orchestral soundtracK" and more. The package will include the original campaign and the scenario editor. The only drawback is the game is releasing "exclusively to Window 10 PCs" according to the Microsoft Store page. Hopefully we'll see it coming to a wider range of PCs later.
Developer: Chucklefish | Release date: Early 2018 | Link: Official site
This will look very familiar to Advance War players, but we're sorely lacking bright turn based tactical games like this. Wargroove's four factions are depicted in vivid pixel art, and include exciting unit types like 'dog' and a very excited archer. Careful positioning and adjacency bonuses are everything in the Advance War formula.
Developer: Fireblade Software | Release date: Early 2018 | Link: Official site
An FTL-esque oceanic romp set in a procedurally generated seascape full of pirates and the odd tentacle monster. You order your crew around your vessel during sea battles as they load cannons, fix holes in the hub, and fend off boarding attempts. Meanwhile you have to target your enemy using a range of attacks, from cannons to chain shot that ruins sails. Between battles you navigate between ports to take on missions, earn bounties and upgrade your ship.
Developer: Creative Forge Games | Release date: 2018 | Link: Official site
If the phrase 'Cold War XCOM' piques your interest, keep an eye on this tactical squad game in which you command a team of agents. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to sabotage opposing nations, recover intel and flip enemy agents. Stealth is preferable of course, but you can charge in with a machinegun if the circumstances warrant. There is no in-game footage yet, but the first screenshots are full of moody lighting and period outfits.
Age of Empires 4: Easily one of the most exciting strategy games on the horizon. A slim concept-art only teaser trailer reveal suggests that it could be some way off, but genre-specialists Relic Entertainment are developing the project, It's a great opportunity to bring back a bastion of PC gaming.
Warhammer 40,000: Gladius—Relics of War: In the grim darkness of the future there is war on hexes, where futuristic units take it in turn to annihilate one another for the glory of their respective factions. Warhammer 40K stalwarts the Ultramarines, Orks, Imperial Guard and Necrons duke it out in this follow up to Slitherine's Sanctus Reach and Armageddon.
Forged Battalion: Forged Battalion is a colourful RTS from the vets at Petroglyph. You forge your battalion using an extensive unit customisation suite before taking them to the field to battle The Collective. It's due to enter Early Access soon but the final release date is as yet unknown.
Phantom Brigade. Another mech game—hooray! This one features turn-based battles in destructible environments and, true to the genre, heavy war machine customisation between missions.
Above: Raw gameplay footage of a base capture campaign mission I played.
If all of your pilots die in BattleTech, you don't lose. It's a big setback for your mercenary company, but hey, there's always more procedurally-generated mechwarriors willing to jump into the cockpit for cash.
If all of your mechs die in BattleTech, you also don't lose. It's a massive setback, or as game director Mike McCain tells me, "Losing an entire mech is an order of magnitude worse than losing a mechwarrior." Still, even if all your hardware gets blown up by lasers you can still take out a loan, buy some more mechs, and try to grind a few missions to pay off your debt. "People are easier to replace than the mechs, as horrible as that sounds," says McCain.
BattleTech's only loss condition is bankruptcy. As the leader of a mercenary outfit, your focus in the singleplayer campaign is on helping an ousted leader, Lady Kamea Arano, to liberate her people. But as you're lining up long-range missile shots against Arano's enemies, you'll also have to consider the economics of running a freelance team of pilots, mechanics, and medics and keeping your mechs, equipment, and ship in shape.
Even swapping out a single weapon costs time. If a MechWarrior is seriously injured, they might spend weeks getting patched up in the medbay.
Inside your spaceship, the Argo, there's a room past the MechBay, navigation console, and other stations where you can examine your budget. Here, everything gets tallied up: the cost of ship upgrades, mech upkeep, and pay for your pilots, doctors, and mech technicians. It's not a granular, sim-like Excel sheet or anything—for example, you set a single, shared pay rate for all your pilots, rather than typing out salaries for each character.
But unlike other games in the genre, like XCOM 2, nearly everything in BattleTech costs credits. Repairing your mechs. Moving your ship on the galactic map. Even using a hyperjump costs extra, like passing through a cosmic tollbooth. Worrying about your bottom line might encourage you to build mechs that don't expend lots of ammo, because every missile or autocannon round you fire in BattleTech costs money to replace. If you're low on funds or underpaying your MechWarriors, you'll also encounter a set of special events on the Argo.
You'll also have to weigh pay against salvage and your reputation with the factions you take missions from. In a 'negotiation' phase before each mission, you have a chance to set how many credits and how much salvage you'd like to earn. Demand less salvage and less pay, and you'll earn more reputation, a resource that will ultimately drive factions to trust you with harder jobs, or offer discounts at stores on planets they control.
Your ship and base for the majority of the campaign, the Argo.
Although economic judgments are woven into BattleTech, managing your finances isn't meant to be punishing. "We don't intend this kind of financial failure to be constantly looming over your Mercenary career at every step," explains McCain. "The game is about growing your mercenary company, and helping the Restoration to liberate her people. Financial ruin should lurk in the distance—and incentivize players to improve their management efforts if it catches up to them—but the game isn't designed to be a constant battle for financial solvency."
As McCain says, you'll be warned well in advance if you're running low on credits. "We want to provide plenty of opportunities for the player to recover—whether by firing some MechWarriors, paying your crew less, selling off extra Mechs and gear, taking out a loan, or taking more challenging and lucrative contracts," he says.
What's interesting to me about the way BattleTech treats money is the way it influences the game's structure. Because bankruptcy is the only way your mercenary career can end, you can actually fail the main questline of the campaign and still continue playing, taking missions from other factions.
You can take missions from a variety of houses populating the Inner Sphere.
That main questline has you fighting on behalf of Lady Arano, leader of the Arano Restoration. She's been driven out of power by an authoritarian group known as The Directorate, led by her uncle. You'll probably want to help her out—not only will you miss out on the game's biggest story beats, but the Restoration pays really well, Harebrained Schemes tells me. If you do choose to ignore these "Restoration Missions," you'll see more and more planets swallowed up by the Directorate on BattleTech's galactic map. "If the story campaign is lost, the Restoration is extinguished and all Directorate-controlled planets become travel-able—and the Directorate becomes a possible client for mercenary missions in the game," says McCain.
In short: if you let the bad guys win, you can start working for them. Don't expect a bespoke 'Directorate campaign' to spring out of the ground if this happens, but it's still neat and unexpected that BattleTech's campaign structure is this malleable. "It's a significantly a bigger game than our Shadowrun games," says McCain, and then studio co-founder Mitch Gitelman, laughing, takes it a step further: "'Significantly' is an understated word. This is the biggest, most complex game we've ever made as a studio."
Missions are scaled at four player-controlled mechs, plus AI vehicles that you may have to guard.
Harebrained Schemes isn't comfortable estimating how long a campaign will take to complete for an average player, from the hour I spent with it, BattleTech reads as a strategy RPG that you'll be able to grind pretty freely, taking procedurally-generated assassination, escort, base defense, base attack, or capture missions from the other factions that populate the map.
And while mod tools are off the table for the studio, that doesn't mean that BattleTech won't have any mods at all. "We are not offering mod support. We are also doing nothing to prevent it," says McCain.
I need to spend a full day or two with it to see how BattleTech's systems fit together, but my hope is that they congeal into something less like XCOM with robots, and more like a dynamic tabletop campaign made digital.
It’s odd to think of Mickey Mouse while ordering a giant robot to rip another robot’s arms off, but in the words of its creator Jordan Weisman, Battletech is kind of like Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland. Opened in 1955, the park was an homage to the march of science that inevitably struggled to keep up. Its present-day incarnations are a bizarre mishmash of the vintage, the cutting edge and the merely obsolete, Flash Gordon-brand retro colliding with touchscreens and VR. Similarly, Battletech is a vision of human history up to the 31st century that began life as a table-top strategy game in 1984, made up of once-outlandish concepts such as artificial muscles that now seem positively quaint.
The series wears its age more gracefully than Tomorrowland, however, because its campaign is as much about obsolescence and forgetfulness as the far future a re-imagining of the fall of the Roman Empire and ensuing dark age that rebuts the concept of history as a steady, linear advance. It’s a solid footing for a strategy sim in the vein of Total War, comparable to Warhammer 40K’s Imperium but less, well, preposterous, though I still think the turn-based battle system Adam sampled in June is Battletech’s strongest asset.