BattleTech: Flashpoint Reviews

The Flashpoint expansion for Harebrained Schemes’ BattleTech launched last week, and if you’re still on the fence whether you should pick it up or not, you may be interested in checking out a number of reviews that for the most part seem to paint a moderately positive picture. Have a look:

PC Gamer Scoreless:

There are a lot of ways to get into Flashpoint, but with its biggest features being geared more towards the end-game and second playthroughs, it’s not quite essential if you’re just starting out as a first-time mech commander. It should still absolutely be on your radar, and if you’ve been considering another round of robot brawling, Flashpoint is a great excuse.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun Scoreless:

Flashpoint is fine expansion in terms of re-engineering BattleTech for extended play, then – far better than kicking us into another pit of mega-story or necessitating a new beginning. Long-term, I’d love to see more vibrancy from BattleTech – wilder planets, more colourful mechs and special attacks, grimier, punchier characters – but I suspect only the latter is compatible with this decades-old setting. Already though, a Flashpoint-augmented BattleTech is a significantly leaner and more adaptable machine than the lumbering brute of launch.

Strategy Gamer Scoreless:

BattleTech is a solid tactics game, but I’m not convinced there’s enough to it to support the kind of long-tail engagement that expansions like Flashpoint assume it demands. The promise of unending procedural content in games is always eventually undercut by the reality that procedural content doesn’t do new things in interesting ways, and by the time I reached the end of BattleTech’s campaign, I’d seen about all I wanted to see. Flashpoint doesn’t offer anything transformative, the way XCOM 2’s War of the Chosen expansion did. Dedicated BattleTech players will want to give this a look, but with as many options as we have now for interesting strategy experiences, everyone else can consider this addition as highly optional.

Save Or Quit Save:

Flashpoint adds a decent amount of new stuff: mechs, missions, and a biome. It evens out some of the gameplay, though these changes will be included in a core game patch as well anyway, and it provides a number of options to customise your game, but some minor issues from the core game remain. The new Flashpoints are very cool, as are the new biome and mechs (if a little overpowered in their specialities), but the career mode is disappointingly cribbed from the campaign; it would have been much better with a different ship and crew.

Flashpoint is an evolutionary improvement rather than a revolutionary one, but if you like BATTLETECH, you should definitely pick it up.

GameCritics 7/10:

Overall, Flashpoint doesn’t offer anything that will pull new players in — almost everything in this DLC is geared toward end- or post-game content, and this is its underlying problem. If all of these elements were mixed in with the single player campaign, they’d be nice flavor in the otherwise-dull side content. However, since this DLC seems tailor-made for people who’ve already finished the story (like me) there just isn’t enough to hold my interest. Perhaps when the other two planned DLCs drop, the blend of all three additions will justify the $50 season pass (or $20 for Flashpoint alone) but right now there just isn’t enough of it.