Tackling each in turn, the Jungle biome is nice to look at with some interesting maps (especially the island one) and I’m certainly not complaining about its presence in the DLC.
#BATTLETECH FLASHPOINT PREVIOUS CAREER PATCH#
The 1.3 patch is free, though, and this is ostensibly supposed to be a review of the Flashpoint DLC, a paid-for package that will get you the following in exchange for fifteen British pounds 1: Still, the 1.3 changes are broadly positive and go a long way towards shoring up Battletech as a long-term prospect. It needs significant tuning before I’ll consider doing it again. Even after seventy hours playing a single Career I still had 300 days left on my Career mode timer, and there doesn’t appear to be an option to retire at will as there is in Battle Brothers or Pirates!, so I ended up sitting in orbit around a planet for a year doing nothing but running down the clock just so that I could finish it and move on to something else. As it was I fought well over 150 engagements during a seventy hour Career mode run - and this was with the “Speed up battles” option turned on throughout - and there’s no tactical strategy game I know of that can prevent fatigue from creeping in when you’re asked to do that many encounters. I crunched the numbers and figured I’d need to do somewhere in the region of 200 maximum-difficulty contracts before I maxed out the C-Bills and Contracts scoring categories. It’s not without serious problems, though, as Harebrained have massively overcooked it by giving it a 1200 day time limit and making some of the scoring goals fantastically grindy. I personally think it should be considered the primary gameplay mode of the game from this point onwards, as I can’t see anyone ever wanting to voluntarily sit through some of the campaign missions a second time.
#BATTLETECH FLASHPOINT PREVIOUS CAREER FULL#
Obviously Career mode has the long-term gameplay goal of building up to being able to field a full lance of Assault-class ‘mechs with additional spares, but you’re also given a Career mode score and ranking that’s built up through a series of Pirates!-esque scoring categories, like collecting one of every Battlemech or maxing out your friendly/enemy reputation with each noble house.Ĭareer mode is a fine addition to Battletech. Contract difficulty is now fixed per-planet and no longer scales up with your MRBC rating (a proxy for contracts completed), so you can jet off to a more difficult planet to try and take on some strong opposition - and possibly salvage their ‘mechs, resulting in a power boost for your company - and then when you inevitably get shredded you can withdraw to a less difficult world while you wait for your strongest ‘mechs and mechwarriors to get out of the hospital. Career mode dumps the scripted campaign missions, the overpowered campaign mission rewards and the cliched campaign story in favour of a completely freeform experience where you start out with the unupgraded Argo and a few lighter ‘mechs and build your mercenary company up from there by doing the randomly-generated contract missions. 1.3 reworks the Mechwarrior skill trees to try and make the optimal skill build a little less of a no-brainer (which mostly succeeds) and adds Career mode, otherwise known as “what I actually wanted out of Battletech all along”. It is astonishingly anemic.įlashpoint has been released at the same time as the 1.3 patch for Battletech, and this is something that’s worth delving a little deeper into because when you consider that package as a whole it’s not actually too bad. Hell, if I didn’t like Harebrained and Battletech so much that I don’t particularly have a problem with throwing more money at them in general to support the studio, I’d be feeling pretty damn cheated by Flashpoint.
Certainly I can’t think of one sitting in the £15 price bracket that adds so little. Given that track record I should like Flashpoint, the first DLC expansion for Battletech.Īlas, I instead find myself struggling to think of a non-cosmetic DLC that, when thrown into its base game, makes such a weak splash as Flashpoint does. In fact, I like Battletech so much I gave it the number two slot on my list of the top five games of 2018. Come on, Harebrained, you’re better than this.
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