Once you've assumed command of your mercenary company, you're contacted by a mysterious sponsor who wishes to hire your for a secret mission. Surprise, surprise, it's the deposed heiress of your former home looking to begin a rebellion to reclaim her throne. It's a bit funny the game lets you choose dialogue options as in the campaign they are completely pointless besides a little backstory at certain points. At least in later content, you can make decisions on missions with them, but more on that later. Anyways, you of course help her and upon the conclusion of the campaign, find yourself free to roam an expanded map and seek your fortune. The story itself is nothing special, and either the developers knew that people weren't buying the game to experience the next deep RPG or were on a crazy small budget, given there's barely any voiced dialogue, almost all cutscenes are delivered in barely animated images, and as mentioned earlier, there's no real character decisions or roleplaying besides "I'd love to help [enthusiastic]" and "I'd love to help [sarcastic]." Strangely enough, there is actually a decent amount of character in the "ronin" characters you can hire for your company (standard characters can be customized, while ronin have set personalities, unique lines of in game dialogue, and fixed named). The fan favorite seems to be a character named Archangel who you meet through a drunken robot brawl you have the chance to bet on. There's a handful of random events such as that that, if you think about for more than one second, almost always have a clear 'optimal' choice to make. Sadly, even before you finish one playthrough, you'll likely have seen all of them. Of course no one plays XCOM or other tactics games for roleplaying, so that's not really an issue, though the small addition of mission decisions in the DLC is appreciated.

 Missions can get a bit silly.  

As with the last game I talked about, Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries, the campaign has much more in depth missions than any of the randomly generated contracts you'll be spending upwards of 90% of the game doing. For comparison, an average contract might be: first, scout a base and possibly kill any defenders or turrets; next, move a unit to the physical base or destroy it; and finally, kill some an additional lance of attackers. Campaign missions, on the other hand, are often multistage events. One of my favorites was a mission that found you taking out a number of anti-air/spacecraft turret generators while climbing up a mountain while at the same time eliminating spotter mechs calling down artillery on to you and destroying any enemy lances that attempt to stop you. To the best of my recollection, while you can fail missions, you're free to try again, although you'll need some time to repair any damaged units or completely rebuild you team, depending how badly it went for you. If you're touchy about losing progression to that, feel free to save scum until you beat it. That said, in the base game, it's pretty easy to become massively overpowered if you pick a particular style and min-max a little.

Combat styles can be somewhat varied in the base game, but at least for me, you'll find yourself falling into a Skyrim-esque optimal playstyle. Use rangefinders to extend view distance so you can see the enemy before they see you, and murder everyone at long range so you take minimal damage. Also also max front armor on every mech you get (besides maybe your missile boat). That's not to say you can't play other ways and be extremely effective, such as using speed to become nigh-unhittable while burning every enemy in their cockpit with a Firestarter or equipping every single medium laser with max damage on a Grasshopper to delete anything that gets in range with a hail of green beams while you jump across the map. There's nothing stopping you from playing however you want, but when you're forced to pay for every lost component and sacrifice time to repair, players are seemingly encouraged to minimize risk.

 That's a lot of dudes. 

There's a fair amount of variety in units you can field and how you can customize them. Weapons come with multiple different bonuses, such as increased damage, increased range, or reduced heat, to name a few. Finding a few M Lasers +++ with minus heat, plus damage, and plus range could be just as valuable as a Gauss ++ with minus two tons of weight. Customizing your mech is much more freeform than Mechwarrior 5, letting you fill any hardpoint with any weapon, only needing to worry about weight, slot left available, and heat generation. Want your light mech to take a PPC so it can only shoot lighting balls instead of three medium lasers? Go for it. There's quite a few mechs that provide unique bonuses through fixed equipment, such as the Cyclops' battle computer, Marauder's increased called shot accuracy, and Annihilator's damage increase. Honestly, these are pretty imbalanced, but at least serve to differentiate the units so you don't feel like you have identical boxes of steel walking around the battlefield.

 You might get fined, but warcrimes can be pretty fun.  

Like pretty much every modern game, of course Battletech also had a few expansions. Really, only Urban Warfare is worth actually discussing. This isn't to say that the other two are bad, and they aren't, but they mostly expand on the game with more biomes, mechs, mission chains and a few new weapon types. Urban Warfare, on the other hand, introduced brand new concepts, most good. With Urban Warfare, came the introduction of electronic countermeasures, a system I'm not sure anyone outside of the dev team fully understands in the base game. The long and short is that unless you see a mech and they took an action in this turn, or you senor locked them, you can't fire on them. Rushing into the ECM bubble also "pops" it, making them visible. While it can be hassle if the enemy is using it (almost always the space Chinese country of House Liao), once you get a mech equipped with it on your team, you're almost unbeatable. On the other hand, Urban Warfare also introduced one of the more interesting biomes in concept, but worst in execution. The city stages the DLC was named after are some of the worst optimized missions I might have ever played in any game. They're completely different to others, giving able reason to use or avoid using jumpjets (as any building you stand on can and almost certainly will be destroyed by enemy fire), and introducing exploding substations that can take out smaller mechs a snap. If the levels ran any better than absolute shit the majority of the time, these would be cool missions. The final major addition to the game comes in the form of post-campaign "Flashpoint" mission chains, which have you tackling a series of missions with time limits, weight limits, and allowing you to make decisions that change the course of events. While the original ones are nothing special, Heavy Metal's Flashpoints, in my opinion, serve as the real end game for an unmodded experience.

The weakest aspect of this game is pretty obvious if you play it for any extended period of time. I'll be polite and say whoever was optimizing this game should not be employed in software development. It runs acceptably once launched, but my understanding is the engine has a memory leak that not even modders have been able to fix, and you'll notice it no matter how much RAM you have. Just restart the game and it'll run fine again.

I think that more or less covers the base game. It's fun for a while, but once you've played through the campaign and a most of the Flashpoints, you'll probably have seen almost everything in the game. But....

 Make Clanners a Mad Cat.

Mods

There are three big mods, though many more expansive ones are in development. Battletech Extended, Roguetech, and Battletech Advanced (beware that BTA's wiki is pretty fucked due to server issues). Of these three, I've only really spent much time with BTA and BEX. I tried Roguetech, but I never made any real progress and felt like I wasn't understanding the systems at play. The less said about my Roguetech experiences, the better, though I think it is probably the most popular with hardcore players and you can find a number of Youtube tutorials or playthroughs if you'd like to learn it.

 Shit's about to get real.

BEX

If I had to recommend one mod to everyone, it would be this one. You can tell playing it, it was crafted with more care to the lore and story lines the player will create. Every subfaction has a unique mech list, specific planets where you can encounter them, and you're encouraged to if you want to find something rare. The timeline goes from the base game's post-Third Succession War up to just before the Blakist Jihad and Fedcom Civil War. With the addition of Clans and a few difficult flashpoints, the game gets a much needed endgame. Think you're hot shit? Try taking down four lances of clanners or completing "The Raid" on your first try. The mod also adds more mechs, variations, and weapons than you know what to do with. This is easily the best "starter" mod. Honestly, if you're willing to deal with slightly increased difficulty, I would recommend this as a first experience. It should be noted that a number of mechs are somewhat balanced (such as the aforementioned Annihilator and Marauder) and mechs are given quirks inherent to the unit rather than an immovable piece of equipment. The biggest complaint with this mod is that the combat is more or less the same vanilla, that might be an issue for some and a boon for others. The mod has also recently added weather effects that impact combat, planet gravity that does the same, and a 'simulation' mode that makes certain aspects much more intricate. BEX also has some of the best progression of the mods I've played. Unlike BTA, rare stuff feels rare, and trying to find missions where Comstar or Word of Blake might appear is actually pretty fun (though once you figure it out, they'll always appear in that type of mission). When you drop into what you thought was a basic battle and see a mysterious group of white mechs with technology your 3042 mechs can only dream about, you're in for an exciting fight.

Star League dies tonight.

BTA

BTA is much more of a mixed bag for me. First of all, it can play almost completely different to the base game. While in the base game and BEX evasion charges will disappear as you fire on a unit, they're there unless you sensor lock in BTA. This allows a so many more options than the base game and much more specialization. Want to to fly round in a half-plane mech shooting everyone in the back with more evasion charges than you'd think are possible? You're in luck. Enjoy that sub one percent hit chance the enemies will have to cope with. BTA also introduces controllable vehicles and battle armor (armored infantry). If you want to lose as hard as possible, feel free to attempt to beat career mode with the "Battle Armor" start. I've heard complaints that this mod feels a bit bloated compared to BEX and Roguetech (Roguetech allows installing specific content packages, letting you tailor the game to what you want), and that's kind of true. The game also has a few balance issues, namely artillery. Although it has been nerfed, it is still easily the most powerful thing in the game. No one can compete with hurling shells halfway across the map at an enemy who isn't even in range of sensor locking you while your lightest mech runs around in a circle giving you vision. Once you get an pilot with top tier aim in an artillery mech with shaped charges, it's all over for the other side (unless they have 2-3 artillery tanks to dab on your with).

 Hahahaha enjoy throwing mines at me while I hit you with two artillery shells every turn hahahaha  

The biggest issue with BTA is the endgame level loot feels a bit scattershot. Sure, it's cool I can find a Binary PPC while I'm still using medium mechs, but once I've got it, I'm really never gonna ditch it. The mod recently introduced a new rarity table, though, but even in my current playthrough, there isn't that feeling of always searching for the next great upgrade like there is in BEX. The first Atlas I took out had a Heavy Gauss Rifle, and soon after I was tooling around in a King Crab with dual Clan Gauss Rifles. There is a lot of "hidden" content in BTA, such as one off missions against the dev team for their rides (why yes, I did savescum to get the best mech, how did you know?), or against Santa and his quadmech army. If you want a challenge, I would recommend this, but only after completing the base game.

 BTA also has some rarer mechs, such as the Zeus X (notice the cool wings).

Summary

In the end, I'd recommend this game if you have the particular brand of autism I do. Enjoy moving dudes around a map so you can launch Gauss slugs into enemy's cockpits? Like optimizing the shit out of your army so they have 15 rear armor but max front armor and every large laser you can fit? All about trying to find an upgrade for your team so you can do just that much better? It's a good game. Looking for a super tactical game like old Rainbow Six? Probably not for you, but the modding community is more than happy to try and help. Also it's on sale on Steam at the moment, and in an Indiegala bundle for $10 (and the bundle includes all DLC, though I'm pretty sure supplies are limited).

Why I assume most of you are here