Let’s get one thing straight from the outset about Titans of Steel: Warring Suns. It is not "like" Battletech, it is Battletech. From the basic "piloted death robots" theme right down to heat management, medium lasers, and "assault" mechs, what we have here is a long-lost FASA sequel. The names have been changed, the numbers have been tweaked or doubled (almost exactly in many cases,) and some welcome play balancing has occurred, but by and large identities have only been obscured far enough to protect the guilty. As such, treating ToS like anything other than a long-lost successor to the Battletech line seems like a fundamental mistake. The story is recognizably Inner Sphere circa 3025-ish, the mechs are called Titan ATs, and the Mechwarriors are called "jocks" now, but folks, for all intents and purposes save the legal one, this is Battletech Mk II.
ToS:WS is technically a TBS, but whereas most games of the type look at the matter in terms of "number of available actions per turn," ToS is built on the idea "number of turns to accomplish a given action." In this case, they use "seconds" for "turns," and thus the whole game is in real time, in a way. It’s not a twitchfest -- the game stops whenever any order is completed and starts again when the next order is given -- and as a system it’s a pretty intriguing one. It lends itself nicely to elegant timing strategies, allows for subtle differences in Titan designs that make a difference in actual gameplay, and permits one’s imagination to recreate the battle in one’s head pretty nicely. Not that I do that a lot or anything.
It also lends itself to some problems. First up, to deal with the dilemma of not being able to move and shoot at the same time, Vicious Byte has divided the game into two modes, Attack and Move. Both modes are active throughout the game, and both take orders independent of one another. So, a Titan can be walking/running/jumping in one mode with one set of orders and targeting/scanning/shooting at the same time in the other mode. It seems obvious enough to work well, but it doesn’t always. The problems start when you want to wait to accomplish one action before you accomplish another, such as standing up before you shoot. There is a wait command in each mode (and it says volumes about the gameplay that the most important command to understand is the "wait" command,) but the options aren’t always terribly helpful and the modes reset any time you take damage. So, for example, if your Titan has fallen and can’t get up (more on that later,) you have to tell the Attack mode to wait until Move has completed. So far, so good, right? The problem is that you’ll reliably have to try to get up three or four times before your chuckleheaded jock will actually succeed at the task, and each time you’ll have to tell Attack mode to wait on Move. In other words, three mouse clicks per attempt where one "just keep trying until you actually stand up" click total would have been nice.
But the gameplay isn’t just slow, it’s also unbelievably frustrating. Unless you use the documented cheat codes to create supergroups that can’t gain experience, you start out with a group of wet-behind-the-ears rookies who drive cheap, small Titans. These rookies will gain experience, wealth, and better toys over the course of their battles, slowly evolving into hardened, deadly warriors driving state-of-art death machines and devastating every adversary with a sardonic smirk on their collective face. Sounds pretty cool, right? That’s because it is--in theory. In practice, the game gives its rewards sparingly for skirmishes and the campaigns can be punishing on the inexperienced, both players and in-game characters. So after about a dozen fights, a given character will be promoted from "rookie" to "green," thus allowing him to drive a "light" Titan instead of a "recon" Titan. This is not a fast-paced game, and a dozen fights will take one long gaming session at least (not barring starting over.) This is only for the second-smallest Titans in the game, remember. And there’s no other way to drive the heavier Titans than to just keep throwing your jocks into the fray, aside from cheating.
Okay, fine, you say. So it’s a game for those with patience. Well, not exactly, because your pilots will permanently blow up every so often and you’ll get to start the process over. This is due mostly to the terrain and your pilots’ hilarious inability to do much of anything successfully early on. The terrain is very cramped and doesn’t really reward long-range combat, so most of the heavy hitters in this game are short-range sluggers. Your pilots can’t hit much of anything when their Titans are moving, and they can’t hit much of anything beyond a hex or two away anyway, so one tends to sit still and the matches often devolve into point-blank slugfests on both sides. Okay, fine, you say. So get armor on my Titans. Well, no, because Titans occasionally explode when they take enough damage and when they do that, they do ridiculous amounts of damage to everything around them (not just in their hex, either.) I’ve lost way more jocks to victories than to defeats: they blew up their opponent at point-blank range and the resulting explosion killed them. To finally get a pilot to the rank of Novice, buy an expensive medium Titan, put him in it, and watch them both get pulverized by their first victory is a unique type of frustration in the history of strategy gaming. It’s tough to understand this particular combination of design choices -- slow pace, small rewards, and quick, easy, permanent death for characters -- because changing just one of them would’ve made the game far more enjoyable.
To make matters worse, the maps are all apparently weighted to match (or handicap) the player’s characters’ skill and Titan size. As a result, even the accomplishments that the player actually reaches don’t seem to mean much--the computer just compensates and the fight goes on the same. In fact, given the fact that the monetary purses for victory don’t increase nearly as fast as upkeep does, the game almost punishes you for advancing.
The piloting skill checks deserve a special mention for adding considerably to the hair-pulling frustration of trying to play this game with all the intended RPG elements in place. Simply put, your pilots aren’t. They may be very likeable nonexistent entities in their own unique ways, but a high starting piloting skill of 65% will barely leave your pilot able to drive his Titan around the block. As was mentioned before, the difficulties a pilot encounters in simply trying to stand his Titan up must rival Buster Keaton for comic mishaps. When your Titan is also being shot to cat food by a relentless opponent, though, it’s hard to laugh. And don’t even think of hitting what you’re shooting at unless you’re standing stock-still, the weather is good, you’re at point-blank range, and your pilot remembered to give to charity the day before. A 65% on gunnery (again, noticeably above average for a rookie pilot) will literally barely hit the broad side of a barn at close range while walking. It’s tough to comprehend why the game is balanced like this when nearly any regular army in the world will still make sure that the greenest tank driver they have can still actually drive his tank before he’s put in one.
The skill checks in general also deserve a special mention for sheer incomprehensibility. I know it’s popular forum-troll fodder to grouse about the percentage checks in a game being rigged, but in this game it’s almost a believable accusation. In one test, my pilot missed 17 out of 17 throws at 40% stated odds. I’m not saying he made number 18 so I quit my official "test" at 17, I’m saying I just quit trying at 17 out of boredom--I don’t know when he would have hit. (For you number crunchers, the odds of that happening through blind luck are 169 in a million.) That test happened because I had seen pilots hit 2% and 3% odds consecutively, hit 7% twice in a row, missed 80% three times in a row, and other similarly unlikely situations with alarming frequency. On Vicious Byte’s forum a player complained about failing an important roll where his stated odds were 99%, and VB’s representative said flat-out that there was no weight given to any checks and that the stated odds are what are rolled against. One can’t ask for a clearer response, but still-after a while of playing, it gets difficult to believe, no matter what is said.
The same nonsense goes for the random map generator. When told to create 000% of any terrain type except "plain," it reliably creates swamps, mountains, forests, depressions, sand dunes, and lakes with gleeful abandon. Changing the setting to 010% or 020% seems to change the density of the terrain-a little. As a result, I have only ever used one long-range-exclusive Titan to date, and never won a fight with it by itself. The terrain is always too dense for it to make any real difference except as support.
What makes all of this especially wrong is that a literal computerized take on the Battletech board game (not Mechcommander or Mechwarrior) has been available for free download for over a decade. Mechwar v1.2 can be downloaded from http://www.sarna.net/btech/bt-mw.shtml, it’s been out since 1992, it weighs in at 739K, and -- obviously dated graphics aside -- it still does a fantastic job of recreating the board game.
ToS:WS is not an entirely bad game. Most notably, the Titans themselves are better balanced that in Battletech, with smaller Titans slightly stronger than their mech-equivalents (relative to the heavy hitters.) The Titans are also more elaborate in a lot of ways than their simplistic boardgame counterparts, doubtless resulting in large part from the realtime aspects of the game. All the way around, the Titans feel like mechs might have felt had FASA ever released a "Battletech edition 3.5." The game itself does have its occasional moment as well, especially when a character is promoted or it’s a friend feeling all the frustration in the middle of a "friendly" hotseat match. Nevertheless, it is not a good game. There are several good ideas buried underneath the problems; here’s hoping they get the game they deserve someday. Until then, discontented Battletechers would do well to play Mechwar.
If you like to comment on this review, please post a message at the forum.
Reviewed by Joel Rasdall.
