Come on, Harebrained, you’re better than this.

I like Harebrained Studios. I like their games. I like Battletech. In fact, I like Battletech so much I gave it the number two slot on my list of the top five games of 2018. Given that track record I should like Flashpoint, the first DLC expansion for Battletech.

Alas, I instead find myself struggling to think of a non-cosmetic DLC that, when thrown into its base game, makes such a weak splash as Flashpoint does. Certainly I can’t think of one sitting in the £15 price bracket that adds so little. Hell, if I didn’t like Harebrained and Battletech so much that I don’t particularly have a problem with throwing more money at them in general to support the studio, I’d be feeling pretty damn cheated by Flashpoint. It is astonishingly anemic.

Flashpoint has been released at the same time as the 1.3 patch for Battletech, and this is something that’s worth delving a little deeper into because when you consider that package as a whole it’s not actually too bad. 1.3 reworks the Mechwarrior skill trees to try and make the optimal skill build a little less of a no-brainer (which mostly succeeds) and adds Career mode, otherwise known as “what I actually wanted out of Battletech all along”. Career mode dumps the scripted campaign missions, the overpowered campaign mission rewards and the cliched campaign story in favour of a completely freeform experience where you start out with the unupgraded Argo and a few lighter ‘mechs and build your mercenary company up from there by doing the randomly-generated contract missions. Contract difficulty is now fixed per-planet and no longer scales up with your MRBC rating (a proxy for contracts completed), so you can jet off to a more difficult planet to try and take on some strong opposition — and possibly salvage their ‘mechs, resulting in a power boost for your company — and then when you inevitably get shredded you can withdraw to a less difficult world while you wait for your strongest ‘mechs and mechwarriors to get out of the hospital. Obviously Career mode has the long-term gameplay goal of building up to being able to field a full lance of Assault-class ‘mechs with additional spares, but you’re also given a Career mode score and ranking that’s built up through a series of Pirates!-esque scoring categories, like collecting one of every Battlemech or maxing out your friendly/enemy reputation with each noble house.

Career mode is a fine addition to Battletech. I personally think it should be considered the primary gameplay mode of the game from this point onwards, as I can’t see anyone ever wanting to voluntarily sit through some of the campaign missions a second time. It’s not without serious problems, though, as Harebrained have massively overcooked it by giving it a 1200 day time limit and making some of the scoring goals fantastically grindy. I crunched the numbers and figured I’d need to do somewhere in the region of 200 maximum-difficulty contracts before I maxed out the C-Bills and Contracts scoring categories. As it was I fought well over 150 engagements during a seventy hour Career mode run — and this was with the “Speed up battles” option turned on throughout — and there’s no tactical strategy game I know of that can prevent fatigue from creeping in when you’re asked to do that many encounters. Even after seventy hours playing a single Career I still had 300 days left on my Career mode timer, and there doesn’t appear to be an option to retire at will as there is in Battle Brothers or Pirates!, so I ended up sitting in orbit around a planet for a year doing nothing but running down the clock just so that I could finish it and move on to something else. It needs significant tuning before I’ll consider doing it again.

Still, the 1.3 changes are broadly positive and go a long way towards shoring up Battletech as a long-term prospect. The 1.3 patch is free, though, and this is ostensibly supposed to be a review of the Flashpoint DLC, a paid-for package that will get you the following in exchange for fifteen British pounds¹:

• A new Jungle biome.
• A new Target Acquisition contract type.
• Three new Battlemech models, one of which has an additional variant.
• The eponymous Flashpoints.

Tackling each in turn, the Jungle biome is nice to look at with some interesting maps (especially the island one) and I’m certainly not complaining about its presence in the DLC. The Target Acquisition contract requires you to take control of three points on the map within a strict time limit, and it’s supposed to encourage you to use lighter, faster ‘mechs to accomplish this over fielding a 400-ton Assault lance in every encounter. However, I found that if you actually use a light ‘mech to get to the furthest point quickly it’ll get shot to pieces by the full reinforcement lance of Panthers that the game spawns on top of it, and anyway if you just put a 95-ton Banshee on sprint orders it’ll get there with enough time to spare, enough armour to sit on the point and not die, and enough firepower that it can still krump an enemy ‘mech or two on its way back to the evac point. Target Acquisition fails at its intended design goal, but still has some minor worth in adding some extra mission variety to the game.

I’d say the new Battlemech models are very hit and miss, except out of the four variants introduced there’s only one actual hit. The Hatchetman is a 45-ton Medium ‘mech with a special Hatchet component that lets it punch things with the power of an Assault ‘mech, but it’s utterly rubbish at its intended role because unlike the actual Medium-class melee stars (Shadowhawk and Centurion) it doesn’t have anywhere near enough armour to survive closing to melee range, and its pathetic number of weapon mounts mean that it can’t otherwise contribute to a fight. The Crab is another 45-ton Medium that comes with a couple of Large Lasers in its default loadout but which, again, doesn’t have the tonnage to mount enough heat sinks to make use of them properly; I don’t know why I’d field one for long-range support over a Trebuchet. The Cyclops is a 90-ton Assault ‘mech that comes in two variants: the Cyclops-Q has a big autocannon and is designed for front-line combat, while the Cyclops-Z has a special Battle Computer component that lets all of your ‘mechs go one initiative phase earlier than they would otherwise, which is insanely powerful. Since the Cyclops is under-armoured for an Assault the Q variant is crap, but the Z is well worth taking if you stick a couple of LRM20s on it and use it for long-range fire support.

Then you’ve got the Flashpoints, the front-and-centre feature of this Battletech expansion. These are multi-stage contracts which usually have consecutive deployments between which your ‘mechs supposedly cannot rearm or repair, and which will also occasionally have some hard limits on the maximum tonnage of your ‘mechs  The rewards for dealing with these longer, more difficult contracts are potentially very worthwhile, since they include Lostech items such as Gauss Rifles that would just be handed to you for free if you were playing the main campaign² (along with the Assault ‘mechs that they’re bolted to). I thought the Flashpoints were going to provide a more uniquely scripted experience compared to the generic contract missions you’re normally doing in Career mode, that they’d be a refreshing change from the umpteenth identical Capture Base contract. Instead I discovered that what the Flashpoints actually are is a wrapper for the same sodding missions I’ve already played hundreds of, with some custom intro text and some custom outro text but which are otherwise identical.

Take the Kurita Flashpoint that requires you to intercept a war criminal. There’s some intro text about how the war criminal is a very bad man, and some more intro text from a generic helmeted Kurita goon about honour blah blah blah Space Japan stereotypes are so fucking boring. Once you get into the mission you discover the war criminal is travelling in a convoy of vehicles, and you have to stop them before they get to the escape point! Exciting! Except not, because Convoy Interception is an already-existing mission type in the game that the Flashpoint wrapping doesn’t change a single element of: anonymous vehicles plod across the map with a ‘mech escort, and you blow them all up. You then get some interlude text that tells you that that wasn’t the right convoy, and that the war criminal was actually in this other convoy, and you then get to do the Convoy Interception mission again. Then there’s an outro where you get some money plus some rare salvage, and the Flashpoint is over.

Even when the Flashpoints do add custom bits to the missions they end up falling flat on their face. One Flashpoint has you protecting the components for a super special new Steiner ‘mech as they’re transported to a research site in (sigh) a Convoy Escort mission. Then the R&D site comes under attack in a Base Defense mission, and you’re authorised to unbox the special ‘mech and use it to defend the base. Awesome! But then the “special” ‘mech actually turns out to be a Hatchetman that appears to be even more underarmoured than the stock variant and which locks out one of your existing ‘mech drop slots, and which goes on to inevitably eat an AC/5 round to the face on the second or third turn of the battle leaving you with just three ‘mechs to fight off the onrushing hordes. Another Flashpoint has you working with legendary mechwarrior Morgan Kell to save his one-time paramour and child, which is (double sigh) another Convoy Escort mission, followed by a straight up Battle mission where Kell himself joins you on the field… and turns out to be a bumbling idiot in a stock Orion who can’t hit the broad side of a barn with his PPCs. I had to keep him near the back so that he wouldn’t get iced while the real mechwarriors got the job done for him.

Each Flashpoint usually has some decision point where you can choose to a) save the babies for no profit or b) eat the babies for maximum profit, but the only one of these decisions that was remotely interesting was the one where I got to choose which rare ‘mech I’d go after: the one armed with Gauss Rifles or the one with Pulse Lasers and Double Heatsinks (obviously I went with the Gauss because Pulse Lasers are still indescribably bad). This was a good decision because it was a clear branching point and the reward lying at the end of each path was spelled out for me so I could make an informed choice; the rest are so vague as to what their consequences are you might as well be flipping a coin to decide what to do. They’re just so superficial. The Flashpoints are an extremely thin narrative veneer over the same missions I’ve spent well over a hundred hours doing at this point and am pretty sick to death of, and while the Flashpoint system could maybe be used to produce something moderately engaging if, say, Flashpoints were linked together, or you could make actual impactful decisions during their component missions beyond “kill all the baddies”, the Flashpoint expansion doesn’t even try to do this. It just throws words at you and hopes that’ll be enough to justify the DLC’s existence.

Crucially Flashpoint does absolutely nothing to address my primary complaint about Battletech: that the missions you fight in don’t make any attempt to play to the fiction, or to provide flavour to otherwise anonymised encounters. All of your opposition, no matter who it is — pirates, Great Houses, renegade mercenary commands — behaves the exact same way in-mission, fielding the same ‘mech models as everyone else, fighting to the death and making absolutely no attempt to save themselves or their fantastically expensive and irreplaceable war machines when things turn against them, and this pushes the already generic contract missions into becoming dangerously overused. It’s only the wide variety of ‘mechs present in the game that props either of the campaign modes up for as long as they last; I was really hoping Flashpoint’s Flashpoints would provide the narrative shot in the arm the game needed, but instead it’s turned out to be a trivially inconsequential expansion whose only real value is that it widens the biome variety by one and the opposing ‘mech variety by three. Charging £15 for that is a big fucking ask.

I understand that Harebrained were running out of money when they released Battletech, weren’t sure how successful it would be and (probably) wouldn’t have had DLC going through the pre-production pipeline while they were finishing up the main game because of that, and so this first piece of DLC will have been difficult for them. Game dev is hard, and they’re not a big studio used to setting up that kind of content pipeline. I get that. Even so, Flashpoint is still the first unambiguously disappointing purchase I’ve made from them — there’s almost nothing worthwhile here —  and if I were to make it again knowing just how insubstantial it is I probably wouldn’t bother. I really can’t recommend anyone else buy it³.

The post Thoughts: Battletech Flashpoint appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

In a way, my reviewing Shadowrun Hong Kong is somewhat redundant. This is the third Shadowrun game developers Harebrained have put out in two years. The first, Shadowrun Returns, was one of the very first Kickstarter success stories that traded off some extremely clunky engine restrictions and a so-so main plotline for the very great novelty of actually being released within six months of when the Kickstarter said it would be. The second, Shadowrun Dragonfall, vastly improved and expanded on what they’d done with Returns to become one of the best RPGs released in the last couple of years. If you are at all interested in Shadowrun, cyberpunk or wordy-yet-well-written RPGs, the chances are that you have already purchased and tried the standalone Dragonfall Director’s Cut. ¹ By doing so, you will already have a pretty good idea of whether or not you’re going to like Shadowrun in general.  And while I feel like it’s a little harsh to tar Hong Kong with the “more of the same” brush, there is no getting around the uncomfortable fact that it is true in this case: if you leave aside the tonal and stylistic changes (which are a pretty big thing to leave aside, to be fair), Shadowrun Hong Kong is, somewhat disappointingly, an almost point-for-point retread of Dragonfall.

I do understand why Harebrained have done this. First, Dragonfall was critically acclaimed by pretty much everyone who played it, and so they’re sticking with what they know works. Second, they’ve pushed the initially-awkward Shadowrun engine a long way in two years, but it imposes some inherent limitations on what they can do with the game. It was built for easily adding new content that used the existing mechanics — which is why they’ve managed to crank out three games in three years — and substantially changing those mechanics would add too much programming overhead. This admirable refusal to allow their projects to suffer any significant scope creep is why Harebrained are pretty much the only Kickstarter developer who delivers their games on time, and it’s why I’ll continue to give those Kickstarters money where I wouldn’t with (for example) Larian, or the Banner Saga guys. It *does* put them in the unfortunate situation of having to do the same trick twice here, though, and the problem with repetition is that your audience tends to have a lot more opportunity to spot the flaws in how it’s done.

So it is with Shadowrun Hong Kong. It opens with the player character flying into Hong Kong to meet with their foster-father to discuss some undisclosed personal business of earth-shattering importance – so important, in fact, that the meeting is rudely gatecrashed by corrupt members of the Hong Kong Police Force, who promptly kill both your foster father and half of the mercenary shadowrunner team he’d hired to escort you both into Kowloon Walled City. You make your escape with the surviving shadowrunners, the cops put out an APB (essentially a hit) on you all, and you’re forced to turn to Hong Kong’s triads for help: you provide them with your services as a deniable asset for hire, and they keep the police off your back and help you get to the bottom of why they want you dead in the first place.

Mechanically this setup is almost word-for-word identical to the one in Dragonfall: there’s an initial job that goes bad, you go on the run until you get back to your safehouse, and then you start taking shadowruns to pay off a debt that’ll move the main plot forward. You have a hub area you return to after every shadowrun where you can buy supplies and talk to your companions, and the missions themselves are standalone encounters that usually result in a payday with no lasting consequences. Even the mission computer is the same, and the rationale behind the nobody from out-of-town being elected the new leader of the shadowrunning group you’re with is, if anything, even more preposterous than the one in Dragonfall.

Structurally it’s all very similar, then. However, in terms of tone at least Hong Kong is a very different game to Dragonfall. Dragonfall had you working out of Berlin’s FluxState, an area where most of the inhabitants were on your side and you had a good existing support network. By contrast Hong Kong starts you off begging for the help of the triads and trying to stay on their good side; they are not very nice people and the game isn’t shy about reminding you of that fact. Because you’re working for them (most of the time) Hong Kong has a much grimier, seedier feel to it – in Dragonfall you were pretty unambiguously the good guys, or at least you could play it like you were unambiguously the good guys. Doing this in Hong Kong is still possible, but it’s much, much, more difficult, and given how morally grey the rest of the world has become (and for a Shadowrun game that’s saying a lot) playing it this way almost seems like it’d be out of place.

Sadly the game doesn’t really make the most of the potential that this shift in theme offers. Although it’s heavily implied that you shouldn’t piss them off, you can go against the triads’ wishes if you want and there won’t be any lasting consequences — it’s just a different veneer laid over the top of Dragonfall, after all, and for all of its scary talk of the criminal underworld Hong Kong proves reluctant to move beyond that core structural idea that the player has absolute control over the pace and the manner in which the plot unfolds. Which I thought was rather a shame, as I feel that even within the existing engine there’s a lot that could be done with the challenge of furthering your own goals while trying to keep the triads on your side. The Shadowrun games have excellent writing, but they’ll also try to pretend the game is packed full of more choice than is actually present by presenting you with three dialogue options that secretly all lead to the same response, and Hong Kong is ultimately the result of this design philosophy being applied to an entire game; it’ll seem different to Dragonfall just so long as you don’t test the boundaries, but as soon as you do you’ll realise you’re being funnelled towards the same actions and the same outcomes.

Which isn’t to say that Hong Kong doesn’t have some improvements over Dragonfall. Some of them are cosmetic, such as the new ork and troll models and animations making these subspecies seem a little less cartoon-ludicrous, and some of them are an injection of features including new weapons, cyberware and the ability to equip cyber-weapons (think Wolverine’s claws) and train them as a skill branch. Probably the biggest change is to the much-maligned Matrix segments, though, which have received a full visual and mechanical overhaul to try and stop the player from feeling increasingly suicidal every time they see a terminal with the “Jack In” symbol above it. Both the matrix environment and the hostile IC programs within it have a much more interesting look about them, and the matrix gameplay has been changed to a fusion of timed evasion of Watcher IC — which have clearly marked vision cones, and which will quickly add to your Trace score if they spot you; maxing this out results in an overwhelming response from the mainframe and usually a reload of your most recent save game — and an odd Simon Says memory minigame to break into the secure storage areas where the juicy informational goodies are being held. This is somewhat better, even if the Simon Says got awfully repetitive after a while (and I’m *good* at Simon Says), but Harebrained just couldn’t resist throwing in unavoidable encounters with combat IC in there too, which means this game segment is thrown back to square one of being stuck in endless pissing matches with enemy programs sat behind Heavy Cover – except this time you can’t even flank them, as you’ll be spotted and traced by Watcher IC.

Unfortunately because they’ve spent so much time revamping the Matrix Harebrained feel like they have to show it off, and so you spend rather too much time in there compared to the previous games in the series. The penultimate story mission in particular is terrible for this – it goes on for nearly an hour, and at least half of this time is spent in the sodding Matrix either plinking away at IC or going through the bip-bip-beep-boop of the Simon Says. Even if they’d made it much better than it turned out to be the new Matrix would still massively overstay its welcome, and in the event it’s not that the Matrix isn’t still incredibly dull and monotonous, it’s that it’s incredibly dull and monotonous in a different way. This is not an improvement.

For some balance let’s talk about the thing Hong Kong does best, though, and it’s the thing that the Shadowrun series has consistently improved on from game to game: the writing, and in particular the companion dialogues. These are outstanding as ever, and two of the characters — ghoul samurai Gaichu and mad scientist Racter — are more compellingly written than anything in Dragonfall. Given how excellent Dragonfall’s crew was that’s really saying something. Hong Kong also does some good work in giving you plentiful opportunities to make use of your companions’ skills; no longer are you stymied by a personal Decking skill check while the NPC decker you dragged along for the ride twiddles their thumbs behind you. If there’s a point where it would be appropriate for one of your companions to do something you’ll usually get a dialogue option to ask them to do it, and sometimes they’ll even cut in on their own. Some of the missions are wonderfully reactive, especially when you do something ridiculous like bringing your ghoul friend to a high society party or a nerdy computer convention. Most RPGs would gloss over how stupid that is, but Hong Kong (usually) acknowledges and embraces it, and I appreciate that it goes just that little bit of extra distance towards making your companions feel like actual people rather than unusually talkative gun platforms.

I think my opinion of Hong Kong has suffered from my relatively recent playthrough of Dragonfall. I haven’t really gotten enough distance from that game for playing what turns out to be a very close relative to seem in any way fresh or new. Given that, it’s not surprising that I’ve recoiled a little bit from Hong Kong’s DNA being so very similar, even while I very much enjoyed the bits that were genuinely different – the setting and the writing. Dragonfall was excellent compared to Shadowrun Returns but it also set the bar for Hong Kong that much higher, and while Hong Kong is a decent entry into the series I feel that it nevertheless falls some way short of meeting those newly-raised expectations of mine. After what they’ve accomplished with Shadowrun so far Harebrained have quickly established themselves as one of the top-flight developers of PC RPGs, but after three games I am suffering from Shadowrun fatigue and am very much ready for them to hit me with something different. Fortunately this new Battletech Kickstarter they’re talking about sounds like it’s going to be just the ticket; if nothing else Hong Kong can at least stand alongside Dragonfall and proves that it wasn’t just a fluke that Harebrained managed to turn out a game that good, and so I’m looking forward to them tackling one of my favourite sci-fi universes.

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