Parents' Guide to BattleTech

This incredible strategy game based around giant destructive robots uses deep tactical gameplay and amazing visuals to breathe new life into a popular franchise. There's so much more to BattleTech than just moving, punching, and shooting. Its gameplay makes you genuinely feel like you're in the pilot's seat of a robotic behemoth, in the thick of battle, with every decision you make critical to both victory and survival for you and your team. There's a lot of information to take in while sorting out your battlefield tactics. Should you let your weapons systems cool, or do you risk overheating, which leaves you vulnerable if your attack misses its mark? Perhaps you use your jump jets to crash down from above onto an unsuspecting enemy, but what if you blow out your mech's legs in the process? The game does a great job of giving you plenty of options to work with while balancing those choices with a healthy amount of risk.

BattleTech also does a good job of showing off environmental scale. While the camera is zoomed out during planning sessions, the game switches to a first-person view when you're firing ranged attacks and provides a tight close-up in hand-to-hand combat, which shows off the mechanical carnage and destruction. If there's one fault to be found, it's that the game's scale can work against it, especially during campaign missions when players must traverse the landscape to trigger certain key story events. It can slow down gameplay, and without knowing how much is left to do in a mission, you might accidentally leave a heavily damaged mech right in the line of fire when a new event is started. But while this can be frustrating, it does teach players to proceed with caution. Plus, replaying these missions means being better prepared the next time around. All in all, BattleTech is an amazing tactical experience that's a beautifully detailed return to all the things that made the franchise great.