BATTLETECH

Every market we collect.

Matched by title — a reused name can pair the wrong games. * is a critic aggregate. Prices and positions are each store's United States storefront; Epic charts worldwide. Audience and Score too, except Steam's, which is worldwide.

Hours played at review time, across 926 reviews with recorded playtime.

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

Ultimately, this is a recommend (but in the year of our lawrd '26 or beyond, you should probably wait for a sale. They happen enough). But tbh it's probably an 8/10 game for me. Maybe even 7.5. You can tell the heart's there, but the game design is limited. My big critique is that, regardless of mission structure, every one winds up playing out largely the same. Perhaps early game, you might play around more with light mechs on daring runs to pop vehicles before they get to the escape point, but by midgame, you have your formula. You know how to avoid or respond to ambushes (of which there are plenty; is there no military intelligence in this world?). As a result, replayability and expansions feel hollow. You can give me all kinds of new mechs, new maps, I will always kite the enemy lance into trickling into my killbox. "But if it's not fun, try a different strat?" - Sure, you could, but willfully playing suboptimally feels its own flavor of bad. It doesn't help that there's almost zero incentive to drop anything less than your heaviest lance for every mission. Maybe late game, you might find a Heavy with unique capabilities that fits your style more than a bog standard assault. By then you'll have the parts to core even the heaviest mechs in two turns, at worst. The game addresses this problem by just having you outgunned every mission, which doesn't make them more interesting, it just makes missions longer. It's "HP buffing" in tabletop format. The Gordian Knot of this problem gets thicker because, as a result of the above, well-balanced mechs are frowned upon in favor of specialization/min-maxing your designs, resulting in odd frankenmechs that are often counter to their intended role. Brawlers become effective snipers, and snipers become effective brawlers (or sit in storage to be sold off because the game design tacitly frowns on true long-distance engagements). There are meta weapons in this game, and unfortunately in many cases, they aren't the fun ones. I would love to see some justice for Large Lasers, but it's 2026, that ship has sailed. (Side note: It's just a little sad how heavy some weapons make the mechs, so like, you can't have an AC/2 shredder-sniper without all but running into combat naked. There is a meta to this game, and you will like it, even if it means "breaking" all your favorite toys to play the game). But, like, it's there. The whole time I played this game, I felt the pulse of a good game underneath it all, just unfortunately strangled by the grip of balance changes, emergent meta, and what I assume are coding limitations or time crunch. A presume mods fix some of this, based on discussions online. I got my way through the campaign vanilla and enjoyed my time enough to walk away happy, and maybe someday I'll come back and try one or two mods out. I've been voicing my grumps, so I do want to shine light on some high points: The OST is 10/10. No notes. It does everything I want and more. It's moody and epic in all the right places. Other folks may disagree, but I liked the campaign plot, for what it was. Had I bought this game before twitter-rot set in, I might've even enjoyed going and talking to the various paper dolls scattered around the ship to learn their bits and bobs. Unfortunately I feel like the "downtime" aspect of the game is shortchanged by the game's construction (as compared to, say, Shadowrun, where being a part of the community is a major part of the game's "feel", I never really bonded with the ship's crew in the same way). I don't hold this against the writers, though -- what I read, I enjoyed. I just chose to not dig deep in the petty bs of the crew this time around. Certainly, I think I prefer this plot to something like Homeworld 3's attempt at sci-fi space opera. But that bar is a tripping hazard. So, yeah, it's "fun enough" (Jesus, I have 73 hours in this? When did that happen? Some of that must have been game running in the background, surely). But I wouldn't expect it to set the world on fire.