![]() That history hangs heavy: there’s more than a thousand years of it supporting BattleTech’s 31st century, developed over the 30 real-world years that have passed since the tabletop game of the (eventual) same name first arrived.įor MechWarrior die-hards the lore baked into campaign mode will thrill, but playing through the story now, I found that the dialogue stodgy. Its menus are spartan, its universe is dense with hegemonies, dynasties, and republics, and its conversations are peppered with so many references to imagined history that several require their own mouseover tooltips. 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. Update Night is a fortnightly column in which Rich McCormick revisits games to find out whether they've been changed for better or worse.
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