BattleTech arrived on April 24, 2018, for macOS and Windows, with a Linux release following on November 27. Harebrained Schemes developed it. Paradox Interactive published it. It is a turn-based strategy game about giant humanoid combat vehicles called battlemechs, and it is set in the 3025 Succession Wars era — the same setting as the original board game, now called Classic BattleTech.
The studio put up US$1 million of its own money to build the game, then went to Kickstarter to fund what that money would not cover: a single player campaign, an expansion of that campaign, and a player versus player multiplayer mode.
That is a lot of promises to make to strangers. BattleTech mostly keeps them.
Trailer, via Paradox Interactive.
A lance is four mechs, and you pick every part
The pitch is simple. You are a mercenary commander. You lead a lance — four mechs — into combat, one turn at a time. You pick each mech’s chassis, the weapons and armor mounted on it, and smaller hardware like actuators and gyros that govern how sharply a mech can turn. You pick the pilots, called mechwarriors, and you spend their skill points on a talent tree.
The developers have said the game will carry the spirit of the board game without using the board game’s rules. That is the correct call. The board game’s dice and tables exist because a human has to resolve them by hand. A computer does not. Harebrained Schemes spends that freed-up headroom on customization instead: chassis, armor, weapons, actuators, gyros, pilot talents. The depth sits in the hangar before the shooting starts.
It is a bird’s-eye, isometric view. Single player and multiplayer. Strategy, turn-based tactics, a little adventure in the campaign structure. Action and science fiction as themes. All of that describes the thing accurately, and none of it tells you whether the thing is any good.
The Reach sits between Canopus and the Capellans
The setting does the heavy lifting. BattleTech takes place in the Aurigan Reach, a peripheral realm governed by the Aurigan Coalition — several independent systems led by noble houses under the standard Inner Sphere feudal system. The Reach sits between the Taurian Concordat and the Magistracy of Canopus, and it borders the Capellan Confederation, one of the Inner Sphere Successor States.
Much of the Reach is made of former Taurian, Magistracy and Capellan holdings. Those three realms abandoned many of the systems for defensibility reasons. After the abandonment, the Reach systems unified under the Arano family and began consolidating.
A map Harebrained Schemes published during the Kickstarter campaign shows the Inner Sphere as a stretch of space reaching between 400 and 600 light-years from Earth in every direction. Five major states, each tied to a noble house, and four minor states. The major states border Earth and push outward. The minor states sit on the outer edge, in the region called The Periphery. The game itself takes place in the Reach, out on that edge.
The wider war matters because it explains the hardware. The noble houses have been fighting so long and so hard that technology has regressed. Battlemechs are now scarce, and a scarce mech is a valuable one. That is the economic logic underneath every contract you take.
Kamea Arano loses a coronation and a planet
The campaign opens in 3022. Kamea Arano, daughter of Tamati Arano, hires the player to serve as her honor guard at her coronation. The player is a former pupil of Raju “Mastiff” Montgomery, who also trained Kamea. Mastiff is part of the detail too.
Tensions are already running between Kamea and her uncle, Santiago Espinosa, who has grown dissatisfied with the rule of House Arano. On coronation day, the newly established Aurigan Directorate — an autocracy led by Espinosa — launches a coup. Mastiff and the player try to get Kamea to safety. The player is forced to eject from their Battlemech because of sabotage. The capital planet Coromodir falls, and the entire Aurigan Reach falls with it.
Kamea and Mastiff are reported dead. The player is rescued by a mercenary company called Markham’s Marauders and joins up. By 3025, the player leads the company.
Then comes the part that gives the campaign its shape. A disastrous contract for a mining company leaves the Marauders unpaid and deep in debt. Magestrix Kyalla Centrella of the Canopus Magistracy offers financial support to retrieve the Argo, an ancient dropship, from bandits — an unsanctioned mercenary job.
The player reunites with Kamea, who survived the coup and has been hiding with her advisor Alexander Madeira. The Argo operation, Kamea reveals, was a test of the player and the Marauders, and a way to equip them for the fight ahead. The Magistracy is bankrolling it. The player and Kamea set out to liberate the Reach under the banner of the Aurigan Restoration.
Scarcity is the design, not the flavor text
Here is the smartest thing BattleTech does, and it is a writing decision as much as a design one. The Succession Wars have gone on so long that the Inner Sphere has lost the ability to make what it once made. Mechs are heirlooms. A single lost lance is a generational loss for a noble house. The game’s fiction and the game’s mechanics point the same direction: every machine you field is precious, and every machine you lose is gone.
That is why the customization matters so much. When replacement parts are scarce, the loadout you choose before a drop is not a preference. It is a bet. Armor or firepower. Speed or reach. A gyro that turns tighter or a pilot talent that does something else entirely. The game asks you to commit, and then it makes you live with the commitment across a long turn-based fight.
It also explains the mercenary frame. You are not a patriot. You are a contractor with debts, and the Reach is a market. The player can choose which house or houses to serve, and the game is built so that choice means something.
Jordan Weisman built this universe at FASA
The crowdfunding campaign promised a single player campaign, an expansion of that campaign, and player versus player multiplayer. All three are in the shipped game. That sounds like a low bar. It is not. Crowdfunded games have a long history of funding features that never arrive, and this studio has franchise history — co-founder Jordan Weisman created BattleTech while at FASA, and co-founder Mitch Gitelman produced MechCommander and MechAssault. The team knew this universe before it asked anyone for money.
The multiplayer is the thinnest of the three. Turn-based mech combat against another human is a fine idea, but in this paper’s view the campaign is where the game’s identity lives, and the campaign is where the money went.
A score of 8.2 across eight outlets
BattleTech holds a published critical score of 8.2 out of 10, an aggregate of eight outlets. That is the number, and it is the right neighborhood.
What earns the score is the hangar. Chassis, weapons, armor, actuators, gyros, pilot talents — the game gives you an unusual amount of say over what walks onto the field, and it makes each of those decisions legible in the fight that follows. The 3025 setting is not decoration. A war that has burned long enough to cause technological regression is a war where every mech carries real weight.
What holds it back from higher is pace. Turns take time. A bad deployment is expensive, and the game does not hand back what you spent. And the multiplayer, while present, is not what most players will remember.
The Kickstarter money bought the campaign, its expansion and the multiplayer mode. It did not buy a second campaign’s worth of variety. That is a fair trade, not a failure.
The Argo is the whole argument in one ship
Recovering the Argo from bandits on an unsanctioned job is the campaign’s best move. It is the object that turns a broke mercenary company into an instrument of restoration, and it is the game’s thesis in hardware form: old things, recovered and restored, are how the Reach gets saved.
BattleTech is a game about scarcity, debt and salvage, dressed in giant robots. The board game spirit is intact. The rules are not the board game’s rules, and that is why it works.
The detail worth carrying away is smaller than any of that. Your mechwarriors are not the heroes of this war. Kamea is. You are the people she pays, and the game never lets you forget the invoice. Most tactics games hand you an army and a cause. BattleTech hands you a payroll problem and a very old ship, and then asks whether you can keep both.
Score: 8.2 of 10.
BattleTech at a glance
- Title: BattleTech
- Developer: Harebrained Schemes
- Publisher: Paradox Interactive
- Release dates: April 24, 2018 (macOS, Windows); November 27, 2018 (Linux)
- Platforms: Linux, PC (Microsoft Windows), Mac
- Genres: Strategy, turn-based strategy, adventure
- Modes: Single player, multiplayer
- Perspective: Bird’s-eye / isometric
- Setting: 3025 Succession Wars era, Aurigan Reach
- Development budget: US$1 million, plus Kickstarter funding
- Published critical score: 8.2/10 (aggregate of eight outlets)
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