The stories, meanwhile, offer a few on-the-spot decisions, such as whether to try and second-guess an ambush, or to listen to the words of a prisoner you've been sternly warned not to listen to the words of. If you've got a lengthy roster of Very Big Lads this isn't necessarily a huge problem, but it definitely serves to ratchet up the tension and stop the next mission feeling quite so run of the mill. Taking on a Flashpoint - optional missions which pop up irregularly on the starmap - means settling down for a chain of battles, in which you generally cannot repair damaged Mechs or heal wounded Mechwarriors between bouts. But now I get to take my Very Big Lads off on new mini-adventures, with the dual benefits of stories that click better thanks to brevity (world-building through wading into character-led conflicts rather than history lessons) and a brand new structure to justify the ongoing Gotta Salvage 'Em All metagame. I'm by now very attached to my high-level pilots and assortment of Very Big Lads, so starting over with weaklings and the slow wars of attrition that would mean hasn't much appealed. There are several ways to wade into the titular Flashpoints - short strings of missions, each with their own self-contained but more impactful plot, characters and decisions - but for me they've made most sense in the endgame. Flashpoint makes me feel like the leader of a freelance, spacefaring mercenary outfit, and that fits BattleTech like an enormous iron glove. The post-plot endgame shakes off these shackles, but soon becomes a futile-feeling loop of cyclic, samey missions.įlashpoint fixes that handily. The verbose story mode has its moments, but especially second (or more) time around it can be a drag - particularly because your supposedly freelance mercenary troupe is locked into doing the bidding of unelected royalty, rather than truly going their own way. What BattleTech needed, far more than a few more robo-tanks, was remixing. Same goes for the other two newbies, the Crab and the Cyclops there's almost nothing to seize upon in terms of breathless celebration, but they make for solid additions to the right kind of squad. The Hatchetman is, however, extremely, extremely useful if you know what you're doing. Unfortunately, said axe does not, in truth, rend steel like a hot, cow-sized knife through 50-storey butter, but instead just deals a chunk more melee damage. I mean, it looks pretty much the same as a dozen other Mechs, but you can sort of see there's an axe there if you zoom in close enough. Where an XCOM or Command & Conquer expansion invariably involves springing ever-more outlandish new units onto the battlefield, the wildest Flashpoint gets in that regard is a new Mech with an axe for a hand. For all that it stars 100-ton mechs knocking seven bells out of each other, it avoids flash and verve and, frankly, most of the colour spectrum. There's an inherent mutedness to Flashpoint, from the easily-forgotten name onwards.

Flashpoint, the first expansion for wonkily-explained, slow-burn stomp-o-strategy gem BattleTech, does exactly what I wanted it to: gives me a cast-iron reason to keep playing indefinitely.

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