MechWarrior 5: Clans

AD 3049. Almost fifteen hundred light years from Terra, the self-exiled Clans, heirs to the fallen Star League, live lives of ritualistic combat and the pursuit of honour. The arrival of an exploration vessel from the Inner Sphere shocks the Clans, who hold themselves to be technologically superior and safe from the constant infighting of the Sphere. Faced with the threat of the Inner Sphere powers discovering the Clan homeworlds and attacking, the Clans resolve to strike first, launching a massive invasion of the Inner Sphere which throws the Lyran Commonwealth, Free Rasalhague Republic and Draconis Combine into chaos.

Clan Smoke Jaguar is assigned the task of sweeping through the lightly-settled Periphery and then driving hard into the Draconis Combine. Their first target is the independent world of Santander's Bay, followed by the Combine world of Courchevel and then a determined strike on Luthien, the Draconis capital. A newly-assembled Star (five-mech unit) under the command of Jayden is tasked with helping the Smoke Jaguars seek victory...but their leaders' utter ruthlessness, indifference to civilian casualties and seeking honour only when convenient to them leads Jayden and some under his command to question what they are fighting for.

Five years ago, Piranha Games released MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, a freeform game where you gained command of a detachment of BattleMechs (big stompy robots) and a starship, and guided them to fame and fortune through a mixture of procedurally-generated missions, handcrafted jobs and a lengthy story campaign. The game was released in an iffy state but was rapidly fixed and then expanded through six DLC campaigns to become a very solid game of stompy robot fun in the BattleTech universe, augmented further by a very healthy modding scene. Whilst the game was very solid, its grindy, freeform nature came in for some criticism, so Piranha decided to address that with a new game with a much more focused, narrative approach.

MechWarrior 5: Clans depicts the full-scale invasion of the Inner Sphere by the Clans, arguably the biggest and most consequential event in all of BattleTech lore. BattleTech games are largely set either in the pre-Clan period, which focuses on political intrigue and conflict between the five Inner Sphere powers, or the post-Clan period when the Inner Sphere's rearranged borders and polities are trying to adapt to the Clans' arrival. By depicting the invasion on-screen for the first time (it has been depicted before in Michael A. Stackpole's splendid novels), Piranha are answering the wishes of a lot of die-hard BattleTech / MechWarrior fans.

The invasion is straightforward enough - these bonkers semi-Klingons from elsewhere in the galaxy are trying to invade Earth (sorry, Terra)! - and takes place early enough in the timeline that newcomers won't be lost either. And it's an interesting stroke on Piranha's part to not only have the players fighting for the Clans (the "bad guys" of this story, but only very relatively compared to the ruthless realpolitik-governed Inner Sphere), but arguably the least-pleasant Clan of them all, Smoke Jaguar.

Extensive cutscenes introduce the plot and cast of characters. You get to know your starmates through surprisingly polished and extensive cutscenes, as well as in-battle banter. As usual in these games (forget the number, this is actually the eighth mainline game in the series, not counting expansions), you can customise your mechs before battle, maybe choosing to switch to different models and then choosing weapons loadouts. If you're fighting on a hot desert world, you may want to ditch those lasers for cooler autocannons, but if you're in an arctic environment, you can go hogwild with the pew-pew. You can also choose how much armour you want your mech to carry, and if you want a cool jump jet or not. Outfitting your mech is supposedly made easier by the presence of Omni-pods which have preset loadouts; in practice I found these mostly useless, and tinkering with the loadouts more directly was often more effective. Newcomers who don't know their PPCs from UACs may find the default loadout for each mission to be perfectly fine and stick with that.

You then hit the battlefield and have to achieve objectives, which are usually some variation of "go here and kill all the things," although occasional pursuit, rescue and defence missions liven things up. When battle is joined and lasers and missiles fly, the results are a splendid feast for the eyes, enhanced by the switch to Unreal Engine 5 for this excursion. Not only do you have to pilot your own mech in battle (from either first or third person), but you can also direct your starmates to hold particular areas of the battlefield, target your opponent or follow you. You can also switch to an overhead battlemap for more granular control of the battlefield, briefy turning the game into an RTS (and makes the heart pang for a new MechCommander game), although in practice I found controlling the battle from this viewpoint to be more confusing than from the cockpit.

The game is linear, but at several moments you have a large choice of different missions to select, which you can approach sensibly (do the missions in escalating order of difficulty) or not (do the toughest missions first to accrue the most honour and resources). There is also a big decision you make towards the end of the game which completely changes the final few missions. But the whole point of Clans is to offer a more curated, story-driven experience with memorable characters; if you want the freeform open-world approach, then MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries (or the classic turn-based tactics game BattleTech) is the place to go.

The cutscenes and story are both surprisingly enjoyable. There's little surprising here, the fact that you're playing for the bad guys and become increasingly aware of how evil they are as the game continues makes things fairly predictable, but it's all executed with enough panache and character you can bear the unoriginality. Your five starmates all have their own personality and attitude to things (although I confess I found Ezra and Liam to be a bit interchangeable), and their disagreements are useful in shaping your own attitude to the Clans. The supporting cast are splendid, with a special mention reserved for Cordera Perez, your commanding officer, who is both a spectacularly unrepentant arsehole and has the most outstanding "total dickhead" voice performance I have heard in many years. I am disappointed we don't see more of the famous lore characters, like Leo Showers, the supreme commander of the Smoke Jaguars, who gets a memorable cutscene near the start but otherwise doesn't show up again.

The game is also surprisingly meaty. Normally a game like this - story focus, linear campaign missions - would top out at 10 hours, maybe 15, but MechWarrior 5: Clans lasts around 30 hours of stompy mech action, more if you replay the game to see the alternate ending. This length does mean the game occasionally struggles to keep things fresh - the "shock plot twist" of a late-arriving, heavily armed dropship you have to disarm under heavy fire is used a few times too many - but the campaign moving on between several different planets, the supporting cast changing (as this is a war, and people die) and the story of the war taking several unexpected turns keeps things ticking over nicely. There are several brutal difficulty spikes which may frustrate players, but the ability to switch difficulty levels if a mission is particularly kicking your arse means you can usually find a way of getting past them.

MechWarrior 5: Clans (****½) is a splendidly enjoyable slice of fun. You stomp around in robots blowing things up, against the backdrop of an epic space opera saga which is well-told. The strategy command element adds depth to the game, and you can go down a deep rabbit hole of mech customisation options if you want, to optimise your combat experience. Hopefully Piranha can match the generous DLC they provided for Mercenaries to expand on the war, maybe giving you the opportunity to play for other Clans or maybe crossing over with Mercenaries with a freeform mode. MechWarrior 5: Clans is available now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, as well as via the Xbox Game Pass service.

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Franchise Familiariser: BattleTech (2023 update)

There has been a recent surge of interest in BattleTech, the venerable franchise about people piloting giant robots and trying to beat up or destroy other giant robots, all in a well-realised setting (think of Pacific Rim meets Game of Thrones and you're halfway there). The science fiction tabletop wargame is now one of the best-selling in its field, and more people are trying it out thanks to recent successful video games and Kickstarters for the wargame.

There’s more interest in the franchise than there has been in maybe a decade, but what to do if you’re intrigued but have no idea what it’s all about? Time for a Franchise Familiariser course!

(A previous version of this article was published in 2018.)

The second edition of BattleTech and the first to use that name, released in 1985.

The Basics

BattleTech (and its related brand, MechWarrior) – neither to be confused with Robotech – is a franchise that merges elements of space opera, feudalism and military science fiction, all influenced and inspired (at least early on) by Japanese manga and anime. It was originally created as a tabletop wargame, followed by a pen-and-paper RPG, but gained its greatest exposure through video games and a lengthy series of novels. A short-run animated series which ran for half a season in 1994.

BattleTech was created by Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babock III for FASA Corporation in 1984 as a tabletop wargame. The original idea had been to create a wargame using large, human-piloted robots known as BattleMechs or ‘mechs. Originally called BattleDroids, the game had to change its name after a few months due to a copyright claim by Lucasfilm (who claimed that they had copyrighted “droids” as part of their Star Wars franchise, a questionable tactic but one that FASA did not have the legal firepower to fend off). A companion tabletop roleplaying game, MechWarrior, was published in 1986. The first BattleTech video games, The Crescent Hawk’s Inception and The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge, were released in 1988 and 1990 respectively.

The franchise received a significant boost in popularity, however, through the MechWarrior video game series. The original MechWarrior (1989) was well-received but it was MechWarrior 2 (1995) that took the series to new heights. Released at exactly the right moment to capitalise on the 3D gaming craze and more powerful PCs, the game was a huge success. It was followed by MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries (1996), MechWarrior 3 (1999), MechWarrior 4: Vengeance (2000), MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries (2002), MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries (2019) and MechWarrior 5: Clans (2024).

In 2001 FASA almost went bust and sold the BattleTech and MechWarrior properties to WizKids. In 2003 WizKids was bought by Topps but continued to release new material under the WizKids name. They have also provided companies such as FanPro and Catalyst Games with licences. Since 2007, Catalyst Game Labs has been releasing new versions of the classic wargame and the roleplaying game, whilst Piranha Studios and Harebrained Schemes have released new video games.

In 2018 the franchise had one of the biggest boosts to its popularity from the extremely successful turn-based strategy game BattleTech from Harebrained Schemes, overseen by franchise creator Jordan Weisman. The game sold millions of copies and produced several expansions. A sequel to the game was proposed in 2023 but it's unclear if that project is moving forwards.

2018-19 was dubbed the “year of BattleTech”, with two new video games (BattleTech from Harebrained and MechWarrior 5 from Piranha) and a refreshed version of the wargame from Catalyst. Since this time the franchise has maintained its franchise, producing add-ons for both video games and more wargaming material, as well as a new tabletop RPG, MechWarrior: Destiny.

MUCH MORE AFTER THE JUMP

New MECHWARRIOR video game in development

Piranah Games are developing a new MechWarrior video game. The news, rumoured for some time, came out during an interview between Piranah Games President Russ Bullock and the NoGutsNoGalaxy podcast.

Piranah have worked on video game incarnations of the BattleTech franchise for the past decade, having released the multiplayer MechWarrior Online in 2012 and the singleplayer MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries in 2019. They also provided some support, including mech models, for the 2018 turn-based strategy game BattleTech from Harebrained Schemes.

The new game will be a single-player title with a co-op mode (similar to MechWarrior 5), and will not be an update or sequel to MechWarrior Online. Curiously, Bullock declined to refer to it as MechWarrior 6, and said the new game will be a stand-alone title aimed at PC, Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5.

Piranah also revealed that their current video game licence runs until 2025 and will require renewal after that point. If the licence is renewed, they want to make MechWarrior Online 2, using a superior engine and improved visuals.

The BattleTech tabletop miniatures game has enjoyed massive success in the last few years, becoming one of the biggest-selling SFF wargames. This has, in part, been propelled by strong (and long-lasting) sales of both BattleTech and MechWarrior 5. MechWarrior 5 has seen three expansions released: Heroes of the Inner Sphere (2021), Legend of the Kestrel Lancers (2021) and Call to Arms (2022). A fourth expansion, Rise of Rasalhague, will be released on 26 January.

More news on the new MechWarrior game will reportedly be released in the autumn.

BATTLETECH reclaims its place as one of the biggest SFF wargames in the world

Venerable SF miniatures title BattleTech has reasserted its position as one of the most popular tabletop wargames around. Catalyst Game Studios have confirmed they have shipped over 9 million miniatures since relaunching the line back in 2015, most of that since they revamped the two core game box sets in 2018.

BattleTech started life in 1984 as a tabletop wargame created by Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babock III for their company, FASA Corporation. The game was originally called BattleDroids and used mecha designs from various Japanese animated shows under licence, but legal brushes with George Lucas and the various American distributors of those shows (mainly Harmony Gold) saw them rename the game to BattleTech and redesign many of their mechs. The franchise was initially a cult success, but exploded in popularity at the end of the 1980s and through the 1990s thanks to a series of excellently-received video games, including MechWarrior 2 and MechCommander, and a millions-selling line of novels by authors including Michael Stackpole.

The franchise went through a lean period between 2001, when FASA effectively collapsed, and 2007 when Catalyst Games Labs picked up the licence. Since then, CGL has gradually guided the success to greater success. An influx of new fans came in with the superb 2018 turn-based strategy game BattleTech and its definitive Mercenary Collection repackaging. The 2019 real-time action game MechWarrior 5 was slower off the blocks due to bugs and a lack of early content, but has picked up steam tremendously thanks to a console release and no less than four major expansions, the latest of which is out this month, and increased rumours of a sequel. MechWarrior Online (2013), although showing its age, still has a healthy monthly player count.

BattleTech may also be benefitting from economics: the game revolves around the deployment of relatively small numbers of "lances," four-mech squads, which are far easier and far cheaper to collect and paint compared to, say, the equivalent Warhammer 40,000 armies. The BattleTech boxed sets are surprisingly cheap compared to competitors, and the sheer weight and backstory of the game's lore is impressive.

Catalyst confirm that they have sold over 160,000 copies of the BattleTech: A Game of Armored Combat core set and the Beginner Box "quickie" set since 2018. They have further expanded the game via Kickstarter-led products, like the Clan Invasion and Alpha Strike boxed sets, and will launch a new Mercenaries boxed set later this year.

MECHWARRIOR 5 to get surprise second expansion next week

In a surprising move, Piranha Games have announced a second expansion to MechWarrior 5, their real-time mech simulator in the BattleTech universe.

There is supposed to be a video here. If you can't see it, go to the bottom of the screen and click "switch to web version."

The original game dropped in December 2019 as an Epic Store exclusive on PC. In May 2021 it launched on Steam, GoG and the Xbox console range, alongside a first expansion called Heroes of the Inner Sphere. This relaunch, helped by almost a year and a half of bug-crunching and revisions, seems to have given the game a new lease of life.

The second expansion, Legend of the Kestrel Lancers, is set during the Fourth Succession War, a major event in the history of the BattleTech universe. This war, lasting from 3028 to 3030, sees the Federated Suns and Lyran Commonwealth join forces to launch a massive surprise attack on their mutual enemies, the Capellan Confederation, Draconis Combine and Free Worlds League, after an attempted assassination attempt of the Federated Suns' leader. In the fiction - explored in the Warrior Trilogy by Michael A. Stackpole - this war becomes a major turning point in the history of the BattleTech universe, paving the way for the union of the Federated Suns and Lyran Commonwealth into a superpower.

The expansion will allow your mercenary company to join forces with the Kestrel Lancers, a veteran unit in the Federated Suns military, in a new story campaign. The expansion also adds multiple new biomes, including jungles, deserts and a new megacity style of map, with completely destructible buildings. Melee combat has been added (yes, you can now punch other giant robots in the face, or nearest comparable feature), and in the single-player campaign you can now hot-switch between the four 'Mechs in your lance rather than just being stuck in one. There will also be UI improvements.

Legend of the Kestrel Lancers launches on 23 September, or less than a week from today.

Warrior: En Garde by Michael A. Stackpole

The year 3027. Three hundred years ago, the great Star League, which united all the worlds of humanity in a peaceful, golden age of technology, fell into ruin. From the chaos emerged the five Successor States: the Lyran Commonwealth, the Draconis Combine, the Federated Suns, the Free Worlds League and the Capellan Confederation, each ruled by a Great House. At the centre of them all and controlling ancient, holy Terra is ComStar, a mercantile consortium turned religious institution and the arbiters of interstellar communications. Political intrigue is rife, and warfare is conducted by vast, towering war machines called BattleMechs. The period of chaos known as the Third Succession War has come to an end and the Great Houses are rebuilding, but stability is no guarantee of safety. The Allard family, in noble service to House Davion of the Federated Suns, is placed in the centre of huge events when one scion is disgraced and sent into exile on the game world of Solaris VII and another joins the legendary mercenary army known as the Kell Hounds.

BattleTech is the franchise that stubbornly won't die. Starting life in 1984 as a tabletop miniatures game, it quickly spun off a series of over one hundred novels and more than a dozen popular video games (most famously, the MechWarrior and MechCommander series) before petering out in the late 2000s after an ill-advised reboot (the Dark Age setting). After a few years in the doldrums, it suddenly spun back into life with a new edition of the tabletop game and two well-received video games: 2018's turn-based BattleTech and 2019's real-time simulator MechWarrior 5 (which is getting a wider release this month on Steam and Xbox). Capitalising on the moment, franchise-holders Catalyst Game Labs have started making the immense backlog of novels available again vie ebook and Amazon's print-on-demand service.

Arguably the best-known and regarded of the BattleTech authors is Michael A. Stackpole, whom in later years would gain much greater fame and success as a Star Wars author (particularly of the X-Wing series, alongside the late, great Aaron Allston). Stackpole has built a career on writing fast-paced but also character-based military SF and fantasy. Like Dan Abnett (his Warhammer 40,000 counterpart, or the nearest equivalent), Stackpole knows that writing good military SF isn't just about the action and explosions, but creating interesting characters and telling the story through their eyes.

En Garde, the first book in the Warrior Trilogy, was the fifth-published novel in the BattleTech line but is widely regarded as the best novel to start with. The earlier books were published when the details of the setting were still being worked out and are prone to bouts of early-installment weirdness (CW: TVTropes link). They were also not as well-written as Stackpole's work, and tended to be smaller in scale. In contrast, En Garde is a book at times so epic it becomes dizzying.

The novel packs more storylines and characters into its modest 320 pages than some 1,000-page epic fantasy novels. At the start of the book it appears that we'll be following Justin Allard as he tries to clear his name after being wrongfully exiled as a traitor. However, Allard's experiences rapidly turn him into an apparently rage-fuelled antihero as he murders and backstabs his way through the crime-ridden underbelly of the gladiatorial world of Solaris VII. His much more sympathetic brother Daniel, a member of the Kell Hounds, finds himself on the front lines when his mercenary company is targeted for extermination by the ruthless intelligence agency of the Draconis Combine. Elsewhere, very high-level political intrigue unfolds when Princess Melissa Steiner of the Lyran Commonwealth has to travel incognito to the Federated Suns to discuss an alliance with Prince Hanse Davion, a prospect bitterly opposed by the other three Great Houses and many factions within their own empires. Yet another subplot follows a dishonored MechWarrior of the Draconis Combine who is offered the chance at redemption by forming and training an elite new military cadre (a fascinating idea which, unfortunately, mostly happens off-page). On top of all that, there is a framing story revolving around the priest-businessmen of ComStar, who preach neutrality and serving all of mankind's needs but, predictably, are up to their elbows in everyone else's business and trying to pull everyone's strings.

Stuffed to the gills with political intrigue and crunchy, mech-on-mech action, En Garde moves fast. As Stackpole's first novel and written under an unholy deadline (the entire trilogy, totalling north of 300,000 words, was written in under ten months), the novel lacks the polish of his later works. There's a noted prevalence of exclamation marks, especially in Justin's storyline: Justin is a big fan of making threatening speeches to his enemies, which are sometimes icily effective and sometimes feel like a five-year-old on the playground explaining why he's so tough and about as intimidating. Dialogue favours exposition, which is often clunky but at least does a good job of explaining what the hell is going on. I do feel like an appendix of in-universe terms and maybe some head-of-chapter preambles explaining the factions (like those in Frank Herbert's Dune) could have been a more elegant way of getting this information across to the audience, rather than a few too many "As you already know but I will explain anyway..." style conversations.

But Stackpole makes many of the characters complex and interesting: Gray Noton is initially presented as an antagonist but becomes a much richer character as the novel progresses, whilst expertly flipping Justin's storyline from a predictable "clearing his name" narrative to a more elemental story of utter vengeance makes for a much more morally murky storyline. A few characters do get short shrift, but hopefully they will rise more to the fore in the succeeding volumes of the trilogy.

There are a couple of other issues stemming from the background material more than Stackpole's writing. The Capellan Confederation and Draconis Combine are fairly obviously based on China and Japan, and a few wince-inducing stereotypes ensue, such as House Kurita's warriors being obsessed with honour, relaxing in tea houses and sometimes inexplicably wielding katanas against enemies with assault rifles. To be fair this actually plays a key role in the storyline, with Justin's half-Capellan heritage marking him out for racist abuse, but it's unsurprising that later iterations of the BattleTech franchise beat a retreat from these kind of stereotypes, with the Confederation and Combine receiving a great deal more nuance. It doesn't help that they are presented as the "bad guys" at this stage, whilst Houses Davion and Steiner, more Anglo-American in inspiration, are the "good guys." Very fortunately, Stackpole upends this idea as soon as the very next book in favour of the setting's more familiar equal-opportunities moral murkiness, with all the factions having good and bad elements to them.

Warrior: En Garde (***½) is a slightly dated but still readable slice of pulp military SF, with interesting characters and a fascinating universe (very much Game of Thrones meets Pacific Rim, with a light dusting of Dune). Some clumsy exposition and iffy dialogue are offset by a relentlessly readable pace and some very enjoyable action set-pieces. The novel is available now in the UK and USA.

MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries

AD 3015. The Inner Sphere is gripped by the Third Succession War, with the great powers clashing for control of human space. With the regular armies of the Great Houses stretched, it's a time of opportunity for mercenary companies to make money and gain a reputation for themselves.

Is there much more we can ask from video games than the ability to jump in a giant robot and use the giant robot to destroy other giant robots and occasionally just smash up a city for the sheer hell of it? It could be argued not, and, since 1989, the MechWarrior series of video games has satisfied that urge in a very enjoyable manner.

MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is the first single-player game in the series since 2002 and makes a ton of concessions for new players. It is set earlier in the timeline than any previous game and does not require foreknowledge of the wider BattleTech franchise. However, if you played the outstanding 2018 turn-based strategy game BattleTech (to which this is a real-time companion), you'll find a lot here that's familiar in terms of mechs, terminology, equipment and even UI, especially the menus and the systems for outfitting your mechs. MechWarrior 5 is also somewhat more forgiving than its brutally tough cousin, despite also being a lot more hectic.

MechWarrior 5 consists of two game modes. The first has you on board a Leopard dropship, where your mechs and mechwarriors are based. You can wander around the ship in first-person and explore the ship and inspect your mechs at the correct scale, which is very impressive. For certain campaign missions and story moments, you can also wander up to characters to engage in conversations which further the story. Using menus you can also select your next mission, move the ship to another system and engage in equipment and mech purchase, maintenance and selling. You can also hire and fire pilots or review your progress so far. This is similar to the metagame in BattleTech, although the ability to actually walk around the ship is cool for a bit; it later becomes a bit pointless and you can do everything through menus instead. There's also much less character here. In BattleTech you could talk to characters, even upgrade the social features of the ship to make your pilots happier. In MechWarrior 5 there's somewhat less to do other than selecting missions and maintaining your war machine.

Once you arrive at a star system with contracts available, you can choose which mission to take and then engage in negotiations with the faction in question. You can discuss pay for the mission, how much salvage you can claim and insurance for mech damage. There's some gambling here, since salvaging an enemy mech could net you several times the pay for the mission, but that only applies if you can disable an enemy mech without blowing its reactor, so upping the hard cash reward for the mission might be preferable. The more jobs you do for a faction, the more negotiating points you can get as your standing with them improves. However, sometimes a faction may direct you into combat against another faction, resulting in a corresponding drop in reputation with that faction, which might become a problem later on when you need that faction to give you more jobs. This system is fun and makes choosing which missions to take on and who to appease and who to annoy a rewarding and interesting system of choices.

Once a mission is locked in, the Leopard lands and deploys your lance of mechs into real-time combat: you can bring up to three fellow mechs into combat with you, which can be controlled by AI or other human players of your choosing. Sometimes the dropship dumps you straight into a mass firefight (with the dropship laying down impressive volumes of covering fire) but more often it drops you outside a combat zone and you have to head in, perhaps using the terrain for cover, going the long way around to take the enemy by surprise or just charging in all guns blazing.

Combat is fast, furious and frantic, but you have a good amount of feedback thanks to a radar and robust damage report models for your mechs plus the enemy and allied troops. You can be more tactical and hold back with a sniper mech to attack from a distance with gauss guns and long-range missiles, perhaps directing your more brawler-focused allies into close combat, or vice versa. Like a good space or air combat game, the game mixes real-time action and a more strategic element of commanding allies; MechWarrior 2 (the game that popularised the franchise) was consciously echoing contemporaries X-Wing and Wing Commander but in a giant robot, and MechWarrior 5 feels like a solid upgrade of that, feeling like a contemporary of Ace Combat 7 and Star Wars: Squadrons (but still in a giant robot). Combat is something the game nails very satisfyingly, which is important as you're going to be doing a hell of a lot of it.

The game provides context for what you're doing through three tiers of missions. The first is story missions, which propel the game's main storyline forward. The storyline isn't fantastic (and certainly not as good as BattleTech's) but it does have some solid voice acting from Elias Toufexis  (Adam Jensen from the Deus Ex franchise) and it does have some excellently-designed mission setpieces. These missions are triggered intermittently when you gain reputation levels. There are 15 such levels in the game and you gain rep from completing jobs for factions. Once you get to a new level, new story missions appear and you can get those underway.

The second tier of mission is quests, marked on the map by yellow circles. These are, effectively, side-quests with their own storyline and characters, along with unique dialogue, with quite large reputation and cash rewards. These questlines take you back and forth across an entire warzone with twists and turns in the story, and sometimes the ability to switch sides and work for the opposition who may contact you with a much better offer. Quests are not necessary to proceed, but bulk out the game in terms of giving you meaningful stuff to do.

The lowest tier are procedurally-generated missions which are simply infinite in number, randomly generating rewards, opposition and terrain and throwing you into battle. These missions are good for picking up salvage, cash and grinding smaller amounts of reputation, though for those who want to make faster progress, quests are a better bet.

These combine into a fairly compelling experience: you do missions to increase reputation, salvage and cash; you spend those resources to improve your pilots, mechs and equipment; and then you unlock the next part of the story and move on. You can complete MechWarrior 5 in around 30 hours (roughly half the length of a BattleTech campaign) but also expand it out for much longer than that as you track down rare mechs and equipment and exhaustively try to complete every quest chain in the game.

So, with great combat, the ability to co-op every single mission and solid upgrading and loot mechanics, it'd be easy to recommend the game unambiguously. However, there are a fair few problems with the game. None of these are massive by themselves but the accumulated array of them can be fairly vexing.

The first is how fresh enemy mechs are spawned mid-mission. Originally they appeared out of nowhere way too close to your lance, resulting in damage and mission losses for no apparent reason. Patches improved this by making the enemy appear a lot further away, but it's still a disconcerting experience that feels a bit weird. 

The second is that your radar works in the weirdest way imaginable, with it working based on line of sight. So you have to see something before your radar can lock on, with enemy mechs vanishing from view if they just pass behind a boulder for a few seconds. Even worse is the low range of your radar, with you sometimes able to see a bunch of enemy mechs a couple of kilometres away and even hit them with dumb-fire weapons (like gauss guns and plasma cannons), but not able to actually lock onto them with missiles until they're much closer. This is all pretty dumb, and a let-down on how radar worked in BattleTech, where you could use sensor abilities to target enemies from much further away and you could also use telemetry feeds, so one scout mech on a recon mission could allow all your troops to lock on from much further away.

The third is that AI in general could be a bit stronger. The enemy default stance is to bum-rush you, sometimes allowing you to wipe out what would be a formidable enemy force because their light mechs outrun their heavier support, allowing you to destroy them piecemeal as they arrive. Enemy AI also seems reluctant to use long-range weapons or jump jets. Allied AI can also be ropey, particularly in base defence missions where you allies sometimes careen through allied structures without a care in the world (resulting in amusing screams of rage from your employers) and happily discharge their plasma cannons and missiles at the enemy even if you're standing right in front of them (which can be fatal).

These problems are annoying and frustrating but - very happily - they've also mostly been fixed by MechWarrior 5's outstanding modding community. As I related previously, I installed a number of mods which fixed almost all of the above problems instantly. Better Spawns removes random mech spawns altogether and replaces them with an enemy dropship arriving and dropping the mechs manually. The AI fix mods make both allied and enemy AI much stronger, so your allies stop shooting you and blowing up allied bases and the enemy will use missiles and jumpjets from time to time. The 3D Hud dramatically improves weapons and damage feedback. Max Tonnage removes the very arbitrary-feeling weight limits on missions that feels nonsensical (given that enemy spawns seem to be based on your tonnage, this doesn't make the game a cakewalk either), and the JumpShip Animation dramatically speeds up the game by removing unskippable cut scenes. The only outstanding problem is the radar, which apparently will be addressed in the forthcoming expansions.

Without the mods, MechWarrior 5 (***½) is a great game beset by annoyances. With those mods, MechWarrior 5 (****½) becomes a rich, compelling game experience mixing fun mech management with satisfying, crunchy combat.

MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is available right now on PC via Epic Game Store, which easily allows for modding, and on the Xbox Game Pass, which very much does not. The game will launch on Steam on 27 May alongside a new expansion, Heroes of the Inner Sphere, and an Xbox One/Series X version of the game.

Franchise Familiariser: BattleTech

This is the year of BattleTech. A brand-new strategy video game just came out (and is excellent), another video game is due at the end of the year and both the miniatures wargame and the roleplaying game are getting refreshed this year. There’s more interest in the franchise than there has been in maybe a decade, but what to do if you’re intrigued but have no idea what it’s all about? Time for a Franchise Familiariser course!

The second edition of BattleTech and the first to use that name, released in 1985.

The Basics

BattleTech (and its related brand, MechWarrior) – not be confused with Robotech – is a franchise that merges elements of space opera, military science fiction, fantasy and Japanese manga and anime. It was originally created as a tabletop wargame, followed by a pen-and-paper RPG, but gained its greatest exposure through video games, a lengthy series of novels and a short-run animated series which ran for half a season in 1994.

BattleTech was created by Jordan Weisman and L. Ross Babock III for FASA Corporation in 1984 as a tabletop wargame. The original idea had been to create a wargame using large, human-piloted robots known as BattleMechs or ‘mechs. Originally called BattleDroids, the game had to change its name after a few months due to a copyright claim by Lucasfilm (who claimed that they had copyrighted “droids” as part of their Star Wars franchise). A companion tabletop roleplaying game, MechWarrior, was published in 1986. The first BattleTech video games, The Crescent Hawk’s Inception and The Crescent Hawk’s Revenge, were released in 1988 and 1990 respectively.

The franchise received a significant boost in popularity, however, through the MechWarrior video game series. The original MechWarrior (1989) was well-received but it was MechWarrior 2 (1995) that took the series to new heights. Released at exactly the right moment to capitalise on 3D graphics cards and more powerful PCs, the game was a huge success. It was followed by MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries (1996), MechWarrior 3 (1999), MechWarrior 4: Vengeance (2000) and MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries (2002).

In 2001 FASA almost went bust and sold the BattleTech and MechWarrior properties to WizKids. In 2003 WizKids was bought by Topps but continued to release new material under the WizKids name. They have also provided companies such as FanPro and Catalyst Games with licences. Since 2007, Catalyst Game Labs has been releasing new versions of the classic wargame and the roleplaying game, whilst Piranha Studios and Harebrained Schemes have released new video games.

2018-19 has been dubbed the “year of BattleTech”, with two new video games (BattleTech from Harebrained and MechWarrior 5 from Piranha) and a refreshed version of the wargame and roleplaying game on the way from Catalyst.

MUCH MORE AFTER THE JUMP

BATTLETECH to hit PC in April

The turn-based strategy game BattleTech has a release date: April 2018, which is next month (effectively). When in April? Dunno, but I'm assuming 30 April and if it launches earlier than that, I'll be very happy.

BattleTech is based on the BattleTech/MechWarrior universe created back in the 1980s as a tabletop wargame and roleplaying game. In the 1990s it became a bestselling video game series, particularly in the MechWarrior and MechCommander series. Piranha Games have kept the flame burning with MechWarrior Online and the upcoming first-person action game MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, but BattleTech has excited a lot of people for returning to the turn-based roots of the series and for being created by Jordan Weisman, the original co-creator of the series who has already created three excellent games based on his other well-known franchise, Shadowrun.

The game will incorporate a campaign mode where you choose what mission to do next and outfit and upgrade your mechs before switching to a 3D battlemap where you fight for dominance and victory, making full use of terrain, jet packs and massive missile volleys of explodorama.

BattleTech will be stomping onto PC some time in April as the first salvo in the Year of BattleTech.

2018 will be the year of the BATTLETECH relaunch

2018 will see a return, in force, for the venerable BattleTech science fiction franchise. For over thirty years the franchise has fuelled a tabletop wargame, a roleplaying game, dozens of novels and over twenty video games. After a lean few years the franchise returns in force next year. Polygon has a massive, in-depth guide to the franchise, its history and its future going forwards.

The new BattleTech renaissance will be spearheaded by three games. Piranha Games has spent five years developing MechWarrior Online and has turned it from a game with a mixed reception to a much more successful title with a widespread, international following (with now a startling 700 battle mechs available to play). They are now developing MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, a new single-player game in which you play a 'mech pilot and lead a group of mercenaries across the galaxy, looking to find riches during the chaos of the Third Succession Wars. Set in the period 3015-3049 AD, the game will have a large sandbox campaign which unfolds differently depending on your game choices. The game promises unmatched replayability.

The game is the latest in a series of games consisting of MechWarrior (1989), MechWarrior 2 (1995), MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries (1996), MechWarrior 3 (1999), MechWarrior 4: Vengeance (2000) and MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries (2002). There is also a related strategy series, consisting of MechCommander (1998) and MechCommander 2 (2001). These games are very well-regarded, not just by franchise fans but gamers in general, for their emphasis on strategy and tactics as well as combat. The resurrection of the franchise with modern graphics has generally been welcomed, but it remains to be seen if Piranha can match the quality of the games that came before.

The next game in development is BattleTech. This is a turn-based strategy game under development by Harebrained Schemes and personally overseen by Jordan Weisman, the original co-creator of the BattleTech and MechWarrior franchises. This game will mix turn-based combat with a freeform campaign in which you guide your team of mechs from mission to mission in a starship with its own crew of individual characters. Weisman and his team promise a mixture of giant 'mech action and Firefly-like interrelationships on the ship.

Of course, there is also where the game originally began: miniatures. Catalyst Game Labs is now in charge of the BattleTech wargame and is developing new rules, expansions and miniatures, as well the related A Time of War roleplaying game. In 2018 they aim to make getting into the BattleTech tabletop game easier than ever with the release of new starter sets complete with miniatures, terrain and counters.

The game also has an enormous amount of fiction and lore backing it up. More than one hundred novels tell the story of the future of the human race, from a post-Cold War alternate history of the 21st Century through to a period of instability at the start of the 32nd Century.

2018 looks set to be a huge year for the setting. It'll be interesting to see how successful these companies are in bringing in a new generation of fans to the venerable big 'mech franchise.

MECHWARRIOR 5 announced

Piranah Games have announced MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, a new addition to the venerable battlemech combat game series.

The new game begins in 3015 AD and is set during the Third Succession War. Players will control massive battlemechs in a branching single-player campaign, along with robust multiplayer options. Previous MechWarrior games - the first was released in 1989 - have been critically acclaimed, particularly the second and fourth games, for their mixture of action and tactical planning. Piranha previously planned a reboot of the series in 2008 before it transformed into MechWarrior Online, a free-to-play game that has had a mixed critical response.

Jordan Weisman, the original co-creator of the BattleTech and MechWarrior games, is working on his own turn-based strategy game, BattleTech, for release in 2017.

BATTLETECH Kickstarter launched

Harebrained Schemes has launched its Kickstarter campaign for BattleTech, a new, turn-based tactical wargame set in the universe of the miniature game BattleTech and its roleplaying-based spin-off, MechWarrior.

The new game will be helmed by Jordan Weisman, the co-creator of the entire BattleTech/MechWarrior franchise, along with many of the same team who worked on the recent Shadowrun RPGs.

As of this time of writing, less than 24 hours after the launch of the campaign and with 34 days to go, the game has already made $600,000 and seems likely to hit the $1 million target, at which point the game will get a fully-fleshed out singleplayer campaign in addition to a skirmish mode.

New BATTLETECH game announced

Harebrained Schemes have announced the development of a new BattleTech game, which they will be funding through Kickstarter this autumn.

Harebrained founder Jordan Weisman is noted for creating the Shadowrun roleplaying game in 1989 and being behind the recent Shadowrun Returns franchise of Kickstarted RPGs (consisting of Dead Man's Switch, Dragonfall and the imminent Hong Kong, slated for release on 28 August). However, he is arguably even more famous for co-creating the BattleTech miniatures game in 1984 and its spin-off RPG line, MechWarrior. The MechWarrior RPG spawned a successful four-title videogame series in the 1990s and early 2000s, with MechWarrior 2 and 4 being particularly acclaimed.

The new BattleTech game takes things back to the beginning. This will be a strategy game featuring turn-based combat as well as RPG elements and the ability to create new mech designs. The game will also be open-ended and will draw inspiration from Mercenaries, the name of the expansions to both MechWarrior 2 and 4. This sub-series features player choice and a branching storyline with multiple endings, as opposed to the more linear storytelling of other games in the series.

BattleTech still has a large, dedicated fan following and following the impressive success of Shadowrun Returns, I suspect this will be one of those Kickstarters which is funded almost instantly.