Two new DLC packs have been released over the past year since BattleTech’s PC launch, with another scheduled to arrive this winter, and the developer has kept pace with free updates, too, smoothing out the overall experience.īut for a game about giant robo people with guns for arms, guns for shoulders, and sometimes even guns for chests, BattleTech remains surprisingly stony-faced in its presentation.
It was those rockin’, sockin’, shootin’ robots that helped make BattleTech, Harebrained Schemes’ turn-based strategy take on the venerable series of the same name, worth dipping into when it launched last April. And if they could like, punch real good, and when they punch - or after they punch - they shoot the enemies with lasers again.
Or, at least, not properly fly, but jump over stuff with rocket boots, and sometimes kick stuff after they rocket jump. Much more fun imagining that those metal people can fly. Nobody wants to think about the next evolution of guided missiles that kill children when they could be thinking about huge giant metal people that have like, guns for hands and lasers on their shoulders. Maybe that’s why we as a species are so stuck on the concept of mechs: if we think about future warfare, all we can imagine is “BIGGER PEOPLE!” “If I had asked people what they wanted,” father of the assembly line and horrible anti-semite Henry Ford supposedly said, “they would have said faster horses.” As cool as nitrous-enabled horses sound, I think old Hitler-fancier Ford was trying to insinuate that the masses can’t imagine the next technological revolution they can only think of a better version of what they’ve got. The Gallant Urban Assault Tank sports a variety of weapons to fight at all ranges with speed and agility, the Packrat is a battlefield support vehicle equipped with a prototype version of ECM, and the Rotunda is a reconnaissance vehicle equipped with a prototype version of Active Probe.Īttack and Defend is a challenging new mission type where your mercenaries must destroy an enemy’s base to stop a steady stream of attackers before they can overcome your forces and knock out your employer’s base.Update Night is a fortnightly column in which Rich McCormick revisits games to find out whether they've been changed for better or worse. The Javelin is a compromise between speed and firepower, with close-range knockout power.Ī wide variety of new branching short stories that link together mercenary missions, crew conversations, special events, critical choices, and rare bonus rewards. The experimental Raven 1X sports an advanced electronic warfare package that combines ECM and Active Probe systems into a lightweight component. Meanwhile, ‘Mechs equipped with Active Probe can reveal, locate, and target enemy units that would otherwise be hidden. ‘Mechs equipped with Electronic Countermeasures (ECM) and nearby friendly units are obscured from enemy targeting systems and immune to indirect fire. The return of these lost technologies will forever change the 31st century battlefield. Abandoned explosive fuel trucks, destroyed coolant exchanger buildings, and broken electrical transformers that disrupt targeting will drastically change the battle as you go. Every building in the new urban biome is fully destructible, so you’re never more than a few salvos away from a new line of sight, or the defensive cover of high-rise rubble. Street brawls introduce new tactical gameplay challenges as ‘Mech combat moves from wide-open natural landscapes to vast urban sprawls. Urban Warfare brings 'Mech combat to the vast cityscapes of the Inner Sphere! Electronic warfare, large-scale building destruction, environmental mechanics, new enemy units and more make the urban sprawl a whole new battlefield.