![]() ![]() ![]() The base campaign starts you off as captain of a mercenary mech outfit in a galactic backwater, tasked with paying off a bank loan so that you can venture out into more lucrative regions of space and enmesh yourself in the squabbles of various ancient noble houses. It's a solid footing for a strategy sim in the vein of Total War, comparable to Warhammer 40K's Imperium but less, well, preposterous, though I still think the turn-based battle system Adam sampled in June is Battletech's strongest asset. The series wears its age more gracefully than Tomorrowland, however, because its campaign is as much about obsolescence and forgetfulness as the far future – a re-imagining of the fall of the Roman Empire and ensuing “dark age” that rebuts the concept of history as a steady, linear advance. Similarly, Battletech is a vision of human history up to the 31st century that began life as a table-top strategy game in 1984, made up of once-outlandish concepts such as artificial muscles that now seem positively quaint. Its present-day incarnations are a bizarre mishmash of the vintage, the cutting edge and the merely obsolete, Flash Gordon-brand retro colliding with touchscreens and VR. Opened in 1955, the park was an homage to the march of science that inevitably struggled to keep up. It's odd to think of Mickey Mouse while ordering a giant robot to rip another robot's arms off, but in the words of its creator Jordan Weisman, Battletech is kind of like Walt Disney's Tomorrowland. ![]()
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