Battletech Extended 3025 adds plenty of lore-friendly mechs and variants to Battletech, and looks like a good excuse to jump back into one of the best PC games you can play right now.

"This mod mostly adds a ton of mechs, vehicles and variants, including new mechs you haven't seen elsewhere that are all Lore compliant for 3025," reads the Nexus Mods description. Factions will use the mechs that make sense to them, but occasionally they'll use another faction's gear—but again, only if it makes sense in the lore. 

It's essentially a collection of other mods that creator TheHaribo has tweaked. It's heavily based on another mech variant mod called JK_Variants, which adds 67 new mech variants plus new weapons. Battletech Extended 3025 sounds like a more directed version of that, with specific mechs introduced at fixed points in the story. For example, the starting mechs are less powerful, which will make the opening missions even more challenging, and you'll probably be using light mechs for longer in your campaign. 

As well as using JK_Variants, Battletech Extended 3025 resizes different mechs, pulls in performance fixes and AI improvements. If you've never modded Battletech before, it might be a good place to start, and it's recommended that you start a new game to see everything the mod has to offer.

You can grab it here, where you'll also find installation instructions.

BattleTech's battlemechs don't have one hitpoint bar, they have 19. Armor values for the center torso, left torso, right torso, right arm, left arm, head, left leg, right leg, and rear torso segments are all individually tracked. When you eat through one of these layers of metal padding, it exposes yet another body segment-specific HP bar for that component's internal structure. When these bones are depleted, the corresponding body part cripples, ejects, or explodes.

I love the way that BattleTech's damage system makes it feel like a series of turn-based boxing matches where you're targeting your opponent's bruises while worrying about your own. You'll lob long-range missiles at your opponent, spreading pain evenly across three or four body segments; they'll reply with a PPC lightning bolt, walloping your left arm, which holds a valuable Large Laser. In response, you'll turn your right shoulder to face that opponent, shielding your body with a new stance like Fraser or Ali. It's the durability of mechs as videogame objects that creates time and space for these exchanges, and the way that Harebrained Schemes riffed on this 30-year-old combat system helped made it one of my favorite experiences of 2018.

The XCOM-style metagame that sits on top of BattleTech's combat is mostly about collecting guns and mechs. In order to build a 90-ton Highlander mech in your garage, you have to collect a handful of 'Highlander pieces' by defeating them on missions they happen to be present in. If you kill a Highlander or any other enemy mech 'too much' by annihilating its center torso, which holds the volatile reactor of your mech, you'll be awarded fewer mech pieces because the resulting explosion blew most of them up. 

In summary: when you're hunting for a valuable mech, you have to figure out how to kill softly. You have to flank, think about turn order, and use your whole squad in order to set up a low-percentage headshot with an autocannon or other single-target weapon. It takes finesse and luck, but if you're too cautious in your execution you could incur expensive damage or lose a mechwarrior, defeating the purpose altogether. This risk-reward choice layers nicely with BattleTech's contract reward system, which forces you to pick between a balance of money, salvage parts, or faction reputation before the mission begins. 

Individual components, too, have special value as BattleTech's procedural campaign ticks on. Rarer 'plus' variants of SRMs, lasers, or other guns are simply more efficient than their stock counterparts, contributing more damage, crit chance, or some other bonus, so you always want to equip them to maximize your mech builds. But these weapons are pretty easy to lose, and sometimes impossible to replace, a reflection of BattleTech's lore, where some technological knowledge has been lost after centuries of conflict. 

Across 70 hours, the moments that stick in my mind most aren't acing all my objectives or my biggest kills, but missions where victory meant sacrificing an irreplaceable component. The first portion of story missions awards you a Highlander, outfitted with an ancient but powerful Gauss rifle and, perhaps more importantly, dual heatsinks. Dual heatsinks allow you to run hotter weapons, or more weapons total, on a mech, and they can't be purchased or found anywhere in the game outside of this moment. Part of the story of my ironman campaign became the gradual decline of my Highlander from all-star sniper to an average assault mech as it shed this legendary equipment piece by piece. Other, less legendary mechs experienced a similar path. If a mech accrued too much damage to be worth the repair cost, the best choice was often selling its ruined chassis for lunch money, or stripping it of whatever weapons and ammo remained and mothballing it in storage, where mechs don't take up valuable garage slots.

It's rare that a game does anything but make us feel more powerful as it progresses. I came to appreciate the way that failure and success mix in messy, uncomfortable ways in BattleTech, something that's only been matched by Darkest Dungeon and XCOM, among what I've played.

I'm interested to see how Harebrained Schemes' planned Urban Warfare and third, unannounced expansions change BattleTech in 2019. Some players felt that the first add-on, Flashpoint, was light on new stuff for its $20 price tag, but it did provide a richer endgame, three new mechs, a career mode that's fun as a second playthrough, and 'short story' missions where you sometimes have to deploy back-to-back without an opportunity to repair. At the top of my wishlist is something that grants more personality to your mechwarriors themselves, who are lightly customizable but rely heavily on your own imagination to instill with identity. Given their history making games like Stellaris, Paradox, which acquired Harebrained and became BattleTech's publisher in June, should be a good parent for this model.

There are a lot of different ways to build a lance in BattleTech, especially now that the Flashpoint expansion has introduced three new types of mech. You might want a bunch of gunners that can take out the opposing team from afar, or you could throw in some light mechs to outmanoeuvre them, but I keep going for the classic Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots tactic: punch everything until it explodes. I feel very well catered for, then, because now I can fling a mech with a giant axe into these heavy metal brawls. 

My big, sweet Hatchetman is the most beloved of all my mechs. He's large, of course (though technically he's medium, according to his classification), and he's rather deft at hitting things, specifically with a big robo-axe. Look at him go!

I'm extremely proud. The Hatchetman is obviously a brawler, excelling at close range fights, and he's got some short-range weapons along with his nasty axe. Despite looking like a big bruiser, he's surprisingly light on his feet, which he needs to be, given that he's his armour can't stand much of a pounding. Still, I like to throw caution to the wind and launch him towards enemies with wild abandon. 

He's accompanied by the Crab and the Cyclops. The Crab's an extremely heat-efficient skirmisher, able to unleash its lasers on enemies without having to worry  about ammunition or taking breaks to manage its temperature. The very expensive Cyclops is, at 90 tonnes, a beefy boy with lots of armour, but he doesn't dole out the damage quite as much as other mechs in his weight class. There's still a very good reason to add him to your lance, however. The Cyclops has a battle computer that kicks everyone's initiative up a notch, letting you attack with your heaviest hitters a lot more quickly. 

Freelancer

Flashpoint has more of a sandbox spirit than vanilla BattleTech. With or without the expansion, you can flit around space, picking missions from a list of jobs—depending on your reputation and ability—while hiring new crew and building a whole host of mechanical monsters, but the story stops short of letting you be a proper free-wheeling mercenary. You’ve got debts, responsibilities and allegiances all tied to the plot. The titular flashpoint missions and a new career mode (which everyone gets as part of a free update) loosen the reins. 

Career mode removes the story and the pressures that come with it, letting you go where you want and take on whatever missions tickle your fancy. It’s BattleTech, but without the restrictions. And without the story missions to work towards, you’re free to build your mercenary company the way you want, rather than just making a lance that’s tough enough to tackle the next part of the campaign. 

Since the campaign doles out free mechs, big chunks of cash and gives you a clear path to follow, the career mode feels more appropriate for a second playthrough. BattleTech’s a tricky game, but the structure of the campaign eases you into it better than the career mode sandbox. If you’ve already completed the campaign and want an alternative challenge, however, it seems perfect. If you get the expansion, too, it pairs well with the flashpoint missions. 

Alongside the standard gigs where you’re just doing random odd jobs for pirates and noble houses, you’ll encounter special missions—sometimes bastard-hard—that come with all the conversation, plot and occasional choices that you might instead expect from the campaign. But since they’re self-contained and optional, there’s never any pressure to do them. You’re leading a bunch of mercenaries—nobody tells you when you have to go to work. So you get the benefit of the story and their fleeting but welcome characters, but you still get to feel like you’re charting your own course, not tied down by obligations to deposed monarchs.

The gauntlet

Flashpoint missions also appear in the regular campaign, so if you’re playing for the first time, or you don’t want to have to start fresh, you can still take them on. In particular, they benefit the end-game, giving you something to do with your battle-hardened mechs instead of the same old challenges. They’ve got big paydays, but they’re also risky. You might find yourself duking it out in consecutive battles without any time to repair or heal, so you’ll want to prepare and have plenty of beefy mechs and veteran pilots at the ready.

When you’re dealing with consecutive deployments, you can’t just shrug off losses, and even a mech just losing a limb could risk the success of subsequent battles. Consequences loom large over the battlefield, ramping up the tension even when things are going your way. A single bad turn can transform a walk in the park into a catastrophe in normal missions, but it’s so much more pronounced when you can’t just fix everything up on the Argo when you’re done. 

While the stories that play out during the flashpoints are self-contained, they contribute to a more cohesive galaxy. There’s more going on now, with more meaningful conflicts between factions. Rather than just being the weapon they use to win, you get to have a say in the outcome, nudging the story down one path or another. And they contribute to a tone—that free-wheeling mercenary life—that just fits so well with the BattleTech universe. Each is a full adventure that you can enjoy in one sitting, and then you’re off to the next one, or maybe some other kind of job. It’s almost episodic, not in the style of an episodic game, per se, but at least evocative of interstellar sci-fi TV like Battlestar Galactica or Firefly. 

There are a lot of ways to get into Flashpoint, but with its biggest features being geared more towards the end-game and second playthroughs, it’s not quite essential if you’re just starting out as a first-time mech commander. It should still absolutely be on your radar, and if you've been considering another round of robot brawling, Flashpoint is a great excuse.