The first of three new Battletech trailers showcasing the challenges facing giant fighting robots and the people who drive them in the war-torn Inner Sphere of 3025 rolled out today, as Harebrained Schemes announced that preorders are now live, and that the game will be out sometime in April. 

The video is a fairly basic overview of Mechwarrior combat, which Battletech creator Jordan Weisman describes as similar in many ways to that of XCOM. However, "the tactical challenges are very different, " he says: Battlemechs are massive machines that pack a tremendous punch, but they also generate huge amounts of heat that has to be dealt with, and they're like a tortoise flipped onto its back if they fall over.   

"There's all sorts of different kinds of tactical combinations between the mechs and the mechwarriors, and what their different capabilities are. Do I have, this one is going to be my long-rage scouter and then be able to fire in remotely? Am I trying to do brawlers who can really go in and use melee?" 

We took Battletech for a spin in January and found it to be a very promising sci-fi mercenary sim, at the tactical level and in the overall strategic layer: Damaged mechs cost money, dead pilots bring down morale, and occasional shipboard events—"mini choose-your-own-adventure digressions with consequences for morale," and thus pilot effectiveness—will have to be handled as well.  

Battletech is available for preorder now on Steam, GOG, or directly from publisher Paradox Interactive, for $40/£35/€40, or $10 more for the "digital deluxe" edition with wallpapers, the soundtrack, and a digital artbook.