BattleTech

The workers in their giant robots suits are revolting! Chris Thursten uncovers Management’s evil plan for the staff in Linux Format Towers.

With BattleTech, Harebrained Schemes has taken the hard sci-fi tabletop game(best known to PC players as the basis of the MechWarrior series) and married it to the XCOM formula in a way that brings out the best qualities of both titles.

You field a lance of up to four bipedal battlemechs in open-ended, turn-based combat encounters that cover swathes of open terrain. Unlike many of its tactical peers, BattleTech doesn’t use a grid – this is a far more granular wargame than most, asking you to pay attention to not just the position of each mech but also its degree of rotation, its speed and its relationship with its environment.

The fact that this is a game about vehicles, rather than soldiers, is vital. Mechs take damage based on the precise angle of each assault, with layers of armour protecting specific components, weapons, and ammo housed in one of 11 body segments. You must also consider the heat generated by your weapons, each mech’s ability to keep itself cool, and how this relates to your environment. An Orion standing in a river can fire indefinitely, while an Orion standing on an exposed hilltop on a moon with no protective atmosphere will overheat very quickly. There’s also stability to consider: take too many successive hits, or a critical strike to the legs, and a mech can fall with potentially devastating consequences.