
New FlashpointsA wide variety of new branching short stories that link together mercenary missions, crew conversations, special events, critical choices, and rare bonus rewards. The Javelin is a compromise between speed and firepower, with close-range knockout power.

Two New BattleMechsThe 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. Electronic Warfare The return of these lost technologies will forever change the 31st century battlefield. 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. Urban Warfare Street brawls introduce new tactical gameplay challenges as ‘Mech combat moves from wide-open natural landscapes to vast urban sprawls. 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.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. 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. 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. It's rare that a game does anything but make us feel more powerful as it progresses. 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. Other, less legendary mechs experienced a similar path. 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. 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. The first portion of story missions awards you a Highlander, outfitted with an ancient but powerful Gauss rifle and, perhaps more importantly, dual heatsinks. 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.Īcross 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. 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.

The XCOM-style metagame that sits on top of BattleTech's combat is mostly about collecting guns and mechs. 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 make it one of my favorite experiences of 2018. In response, you'll turn your right shoulder to face that opponent, shielding your body with a new stance like Fraser or Ali. 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.

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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.
