echwarrior: Dark Age transforms the venerable Battletech strategy and computer games into a tabletop collectible game based on WizKids' "Clix" engine.
Like its predecessors, Mechwarrior revolves around battles between three-story-tall war machines striving to conquer a galaxy's worth of worlds. The game moves the Battletech storyline forward, catapulting it decades into the future. The Clan wars of the previous era are over, and many of the old battlemechs have been destroyed or decommissioned.
Unfortunately, the peace does not hold. An unknown force shatters the galaxy's communication network and a new era of warfare erupts. Old battlemechs return to front-line service, joined by their newly converted industrial cousins. With many of the old war machines destroyed, new tanks and armored vehicles have been pressed into service to support the surviving mechs. Armored infantry also plays a far expanded role on the battlefield.
The game mechanic of Mechwarrior is similar to WizKids' other Clix games, Mage Knight and HeroClix. There are three sorts of figures—mechs, vehicles and infantry—and each is mounted on a base. The base contains vital statistics about the figure, including what sort of weapons it has, how much damage it can take and how fast it can move. As the figure takes damage, the base is rotated and these values change, sometimes getting worse, rarely getting better.
A key element of Battletech has always been heat. Mechs generate a heck of a lot of it when they fire their weapons and move, and WizKids has introduced a new technique for tracking it: a heat dial. Normally, figures in the game can be moved only every other turn. If they are moved on back-to-back turns, they take a "click" of damage and the base is rotated. Mechs are different—they can move from round to round without taking damage, but instead they take "clicks" of heat. If they take too much heat, mechs can shut down or take catastrophic damage.
The game is collectible, with 116 figures of varying types sold in two formats: starters, which contain the instructions and one mech, two vehicles and five infantry units; and boosters, containing one mech, one vehicle and two infantry units. Unlike HeroClix, which uses pre-made maps, Mechwarrior can be played on any surface; movement is measured in inches rather than squares.
Same universe, different style
When FASA, the company responsible for creating the original Battletech miniatures game and novels, folded in 2001, fans of the game were nervous. And when WizKids announced that it had bought the license from FASA, and was going to release a clickable game based on Battletech, they were downright worried.
They shouldn't have been. Mechwarrior: Dark Age captures most of what's good about Battletech and translates it into an excellent "clickable" game.
Fans will find that the massive, vaguely humanoid war machines still dominate the battlefield, although in fewer numbers than in previous incarnations of the game. It includes popular maneuvers like "alpha strike" (which involves firing all of a mech's weapons at once) and "death from above" (in which a mech uses powerful jump jets to send itself flying into the air and then crashing down on its enemy). And thanks to the game's innovative heat dial, it's still very possible that a mech will shut down (or explode) because it fired its weapons too frequently, ran too hard or took too many hits by enemy weapons.
The game's very approachable for new players. In addition to using a game mechanic with which they may already be familiar, everything they need to play the game is included in the starter pack. There's one slim rule book, a reference card, some dice and a measuring tape—no more rule books and "technical readouts" to carry around. The game's quick to play out of the box, although it can take quite a few games to master.
The game does have a few minor faults. The mechs look darn good for mass-produced plastic miniatures, but some of finer details—like mech antennas, delicate arms, minor bits of armor—can fall off. It's easy to put them back on, and most mechs don't suffer from this problem, but it can be annoying. Battletech loyalists may be disappointed by the lack of customization in Dark Age: because of the game's clickable, pre-made nature, it's simply not possible to build custom mechs as it was in the original Battletech. Such fans will also note—and possibly gripe—that the new mech designs aren't absolutely true to their predecessors, but most folks simply won't notice. The game plays far faster than the previous tabletop version; it's easy to shred a full-strength mech in a few rounds of combat. This isn't really a fault, but it can be an adjustment.
These are minor quibbles. The game itself is solid, well-balanced and fun, combining the strategy and tactics of the original game with the shallow learning curve of WizKids' other games.
Mechwarrior: Dark Age can't replace the original Battletech, and none of the guys in my gaming group are planning on giving up the original game. It does, however, provide a quick and easy alternative to the traditional mech slugfest.
— Ken
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