This is confirmed to be the best BattleTech game of all time.
Not that there is much in terms of competition.
Well how are we to define that anyway? Personally though, I'd say MechCommander for example is a better game, now that I finished this game (speaking of which, one of the things to bitch about is that the game's name makes for a lot of confusion about if one is talking about the franchise, the setting, the tabletop game, or the video game; it's a fucking nightmare).
To start with, in my opinion and tastes I feel the way difficulty rises up just feels wrong, it often feels unfair rather than challenging. It takes away from sense of accomplishment and progress when your new acquisitions end up being overshadowed by the way odds against you are raised at the same time. The problem isn't so much the fact there's more enemies, that I feel is par the course, main thing is really just that the numbers combined with enemy pilot levels I feel take away from the enjoyment. This is of course 100% subjective, as vast majority of matters of difficulty are. Still, the end result is that by the end of the game I mostly just felt exhaustion and relief from slogging drudgery of the 65+ ton plus latter near-half of the game, rather than elation and joy at the end of a satisfying journey.
The big issue with the game to me is more of a structural and purpose. Namely, its primary goal of being a tactical game. I believe the game would have been greatly improved by focusing on being an RPG rather than a tactical game (or vice versa). The freeroam skirmishes and linear campaign eat each other and reduce the quality of both. The free roam skirmish thing gets old really fast due to the limited scope of maps and objectives but most impotantly the limited number of ways you can approach your goals (a comparison even if not a fitting analogy due to different genre of gameplay would be the side mission structure of MGSV where the more elaborate level design and freedom of approach work in advantage of the game). Meanwhile, the linear campaign is better but it lacks variety and fluidity. Obvious comparison would be MechCommander, which has a fun and extensive campaign that it devoted full resources to crafting out.
But to me, the focus on tactical and management gameplay over HBS' strengths is probably the biggest disappointment, and one I honestly knew would be coming. Simply put, I don't think it was the right decision at all to have random hired help for MechWarriors. It's a step back to Shadowrun Returns when compared to Dragonfall and Hong Kong, the superior HBS games. Having a defined and fleshed out core party and supporting characters in a HBS game would be something I'd greatly prefer, as I figure a crafted linear campaign would be. A mission editor and a means to integrate it to the campaign to replace the free roam skirmish aspect would have been better in my opinion. And I feel a lot of these things have the fundamentals present in the game (like, there are some interesting elements to the story and your crew, they are simply very rudimentary and lacking in fleshing out because they were not the focus of the game), the problems I have are rooted in the early decision to what direction the game would develop in which ruled them out.
So overall, decent game, better than Shadowrun Returns but not even close to Dragonfall or Hong Kong.
