Recent reviews by Daemeous

I'm a healer, I don't really like Mythic+ in WoW, but I REALLY love this game, even got into top 20 Vigours in the world!

I love Final Fantasy, and for whatever reason Dragoons especially. There's just something so badass about a guy who grabs a lance and decides to hunt dragons. Learns to jump so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ high that it no longer matters that dragons can fly, that just means they expose their underbellies to a lance charge from below!

No Final Fantasy game has given me the fantasy of being a dragoon, not even FFO:SOP. Until this game.

I've bested a dragon by jumping over it's flame breath and stabbing it in the head, dodged and parried blows, clipped it's wings. Struck it with epic combo finishers and utterly dominated it throughout the fight. Hell, at another point in the story I rode Bahamut and had a Megaflare Kamehameha duel to finish off a god!

Right here, this is my Dragoon Fantasy! (And it's some blonde cheerleader, but hey, I'll still take it!)

When I docked my fighter on the back of my destroyer. Lost myself looking out into the beautiful space zooming past, only to see some hostile ships coming on an intercept course and make a mad dash for the bridge as my turrets fired and enemy fire bounced off the shields. to finally take control and blast them into dust did I realise something.

All this happened organically, no scripted set piece. No smoke and mirrors when you're on foot. I was on my ship, docked on my other ship, watching the real universe fly by just as if I was flying the ship myself. Awesome.

I love TRPGs, I love giant mechs, I love this overworld progression system. This game is my jam!

The gameplay is glorious! I'm not so much a fan of the random element of hit/miss gameplay but it really does feel fun here! Customise your mechs to fir your playstyle and just do awesome stuff, there are few things more satisfying that jumpjetting behind a mech and unleashing an alpha strike with 5 SRMs and getting away without overheating because you landed in water. Actions in this game truly do feel rewarding! Planning elements too "oh, this planet is a near vacuum; better strip off my lasers and PPCs for more heat efficient weapons and play conservatively with jumpjets!" "Oh yeah, a tundra biome with water!? Jumpjets and energy weapons for everyone!" "Desert storm? Best bring a Mechwarrior who can sensor scan to spot enemies for me!"

On the same note though, it's not all great, because the game's random nature will bite you so many times, over and over again. Wounded Mechwarriors take too long to heat, the game claims there's a 1% chance of a headshot occuring, which is lower than the tabletop game's 2.88% chance, but that clearly doesn't seem to be the case because it happens all the damn time! I'm all for punishment if I screw up, but just randomly?

As for improvements, well I want to see more! Mechs, equipment, lostech, biomes, you name it! I can't wait for the DLC, wanna get some clan mechs in!

I've not finished the story yet but I love the way it's going. While it's not quite got the Shadowrun Returns levels of awesome the story exceeds the shallow paint-by-numbers stories we get in most AAA games. HBS knows what they're doing with narratives, and that's refreshing. So far, it doesn't seem exactly Battletech though, it's a universe of greys but as we're moving on. The antagonists are becoming more black and the heroine you support is very white. She understands her need to be a strong figurehead to be rallied around and give hope but she criticises herself for not being enough of a larger than life hero.

Also an appeal here to the developers; please keep your politics out of your games. You believe whatever you want to beleive but don't try to push those beliefs onto others. Those petty political disputes make absoloutely no sense in the Battletech universe. Why do the faction have to be stated that they're diverse? Of course they are; they're interstellar empires without eugenics! No trueborn here! And what's with the pronouns thing? It's just weird; why "they"? If you're going to add that at all why not just make it another text field? It's such an oddly specific thing too, why not sex as is the convention? Or gender if you want to avoid such a "colourful" word?

Technically speaking the game is in an iffy state at present. As is the case with most Paradox titles at launch but I'm sure those'll be fixed in the coming weeks. Losing focus minimises the window, meaning I can't do things on my second monitor while waiting for the enemy to slowly take their turn (the delays after the animations finishing and the next action being taken can be painstakingly long) or while loading. The game has a memory leak that causes it to just keep eating up RAM. The game will gleefully max out your GPU on the menu screens until you enable Vsync or another frame limiter, something I've not seen since Dawn of War II. The load times are overly long even on an SSD. I've had no crashes yet though in my many hours of play.

In spite of all that, this is a very fun game and I just cannot reccomend it enough! I really hope we see some great mods for this game too...

Actually I just had a look, nexusmods has a Battletech section and it's already filling up with some great mods! Review over, time to browse!

Edit: to add to this RNG headshot insanity; I've just given Glitch an AC10 and she's scored 3 headshots out of 5 total shots with the damn thing!

Bare bones port, 720p30 locked, unlockable with GeDoSaTo, indistingushable from console experience other than load times. Be aware of the 58 GB hard drive footprint. People are complaiing about performance issues which I haven't experienced (stock 3570K & 770).

Hoping this recieves a similar community treatment that Dark Souls has.

Verdict: Appropriately priced if you have a controller, decent rig, don't mind 720p30 and haven't experienced the game before as it offers next to nothing over the console release.

Wow...I'm a gameplay mechanics trumps story guy and I bought this for the mechanics and wasn't disappointed but the story...the story is incredible. This isn't just a game; it's an experience. It's not a happy one, however. The game will pull you along by your heart strings, all the way to the end.

The current asking price (£15/$20) may seem high for the game length (5-7 hours) but the quality, which Transistor oozes in spades, more than makes up for it.

Everyone owes it to themselves to experience this game in their lifetime.