Urban environments introduced by the second expansion add a new level of nuance to landscapes: everything is destructible, from the cars lying abandoned in the streets, to the tallest of buildings. The first two expansions are very welcome structural improvements to the base game, but Heavy Metal is built for fans first and foremost and the best of them all. Only a couple of missions in the main single-player campaign come close to the tension the final battle in the Heavy Metal storyline evokes, and it's clear that developers wanted to please fans with more than just a simple array of new 'Mechs. and even with what seems an unfair advantage, every battle was fun and perfectly doable. It's a properly epic series of missions that will test your skill as a commander and will reward you in more than one way, and will make you wonder if your character and MechWarriors will ever be able to gain the same deadly skills as your opposition. As an appetiser for fans, let's just say that the spider and the green man are fighting over something from Minnesota. Heavy Metal in particular features only one of these mini-campaigns, but it's the most complex and surprising of them all: it starts off as a simple recovery contract but if you play your cards correctly, your mercenary unit will emerge from it as legends. Flashpoints are usually two to three missions long and might include consecutive deployments (during which you don't have time to repair 'Mechs or heal MechWarriors) or player-driven choices that will alter the course of the contract: for example, do you act as the main assault force or create a diversion? Or do you double-cross your employer by stealing the prototype they asked you to recover in the first place? These decisions lead to different missions and salvage, but no long-lasting consequences that will affect your mercenary outfit or the main single-player campaign.įlashpoint campaigns might also feature well-known characters from the BattleTech lore, and some are quite surprising. Also the 'Mechs introduced by the expansions give much needed variety to some weight classes, which were previously dominated by a couple of designs.įlashpoint introduces mini-campaigns to the single-player called, in a rather unimaginative way, flashpoints. But BattleTech fans will be delighted in seeing classic designs such as Warhammer and Assassin roam the map and behave like the sourcebooks described, something that was never fully realised in the tabletop outside advanced optional or custom rules. Unfortunately old 'Mechs haven't received any exclusive equipment, and a lot of the new designs will eclipse old hardware fast. Notable additions are the Cyclops (Flashpoint) and its battlecomputer that moves all allied units to an earlier turn the Marauder (Heavy Metal) reduces damage taken by allied units the Raven (Urban Warfare) brings advanced cloaking and detection sensors into the fray. The new 'Mechs introduced by these expansions are very different from 'Mechs in the base game: all of them have one exclusive piece of equipment that sets them apart from the rest, which gives every new machine its own identity, often linked to the lore established by tabletop sourcebooks. * Heavy Metal: eight new 'Mechs (including the first designed for the game), new weapons, a new flashpoint campaign, and official mod support * Urban Warfare: two new 'Mechs, new vehicles, new equipment, urban environments, stray shot rules, and more flashpoint missions * Flashpoint: two new 'Mechs, a new terrain type, a new multiplayer mode, and flashpoints, self-contained campaigns that don't affect the main single-player story The three expansions further elaborate these improvements, especially in the single-player department. But before diving into them, it must be said said that BattleTech (from now on, unless otherwise noted, the videogame) saw a number of big and small changes since its inception, refining weapon balance, multiplayer, pilot skills in the single-player campaign, interface, and performance. ![]() These three expansions are the focus of this review. 2019 has been a good year for BattleTech fans: the board game got a wildly successful Kickstarter for a full re-imagining of the Clan Invasion (a pivotal point in the BT universe), MechWarrior 5 will release in mid-December on PCs, and BattleTech (the turn-based strategy videogame) got two expansions to complement the first, released in late 2018.
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