Game Review: Battletech: the Crescent Hawk's [sic] Inception

[dorchadas]

This was not my first introduction to the Battletech setting--that was Mechwarrior 1, a game I never beat because it had timed missions and I really didn't feel comfortable starting the story until I had a full lance of Battlemasters--but it was the game I played the most. Even as a callow youth, I was already super into RPGs so the combination of tactical combat and RPG statistic development immediately drew me in. Unlike the Fellowship of the Ring DOS game, all the story was contained within the game rather than forcing me to constantly consult a manual, and also I didn't have to suffer through a terribly underpowered phase in order to climb up to RPG greatness. I remember spending hours roaming around the fields of Pacifica, fighting other mechs, going to buildings, looking for secrets.

One of the advantages of the internet is the quick ability to take games apart and find out any hidden content so that everyone can experience it, but it's a disadvantage too. As a child, the world of Crescent Hawks' Inception seemed so large, with the people roaming around towns and entering and leaving buildings, the forests and grasslands and rock fields of Pacifica, the hidden team members that you can find, but looking online I learn that it was never as big as I imagined. There is no fourth mechwarrior party member you can find. The vast majority of the people you can talk to in those towns having nothing to say other than some variation of "Get outta my face!" But Crescent Hawks' Inception has such a big space in my imagination because of those mysterious spaces. If I had known the game's limitations then, I wouldn't have any fond memories and would never have bothered to replay it now.

It's not Battletech without the technical readout.

Crescent Hawks' Inception is the story of Jason Youngblood, son of former Kell Hounds member Jeremiah Youngblood, in training at the Citadel mechwarrior training academy on the world of Pacifica. The beginning of the game is the most RPG-like part, with Jason roaming around the Citadel, talking to people, paying for supplementary training in hand weapons or medical and technical skill, and taking classes to learn how to pilot a battlemech. This part is a bit weird, because even though I tagged this post as "CRPG" the game is really only a CRPG in the first quarter or so, because once you leave the Citadel it's impossible to increase any of your skills other than Technical or Medical. Also, weapon skills increase at a set rate per class taken, but battlemech gunnery and piloting skills are random per mission completed, which means that the most advantageous way of playing the game is to get through the first few training missions to the one where you solo fight against multiple battlemechs and then lose repeatedly until your skills are both at Excellent. Having failed like six times in a row, you will have honed your training to such an extent that you'll be able to bullseye basically every other mech in the game.

The game is full of those sorts of exploits, as it turned out. The one I did figure out as a kid is infinite money--there's an in-game stock market with three stocks I can sum up as "barely moves", "safe profits", and "insanely risky", so the optimal choice is to put all of your allowance in "safe profits" and then go off and do something else for a while to let it tick in the background. The game is touchy about exactly what spots you can be in to allow the stock market to function and it might take experimentation, but I left the Citadel with heavy armor, an anti-mech missile launcher (the only weapon worth buying because it will instantly kill any foot soldiers), Excellent rating in all personal-scale combat skills, and enough money to do whatever I wanted. It's possible to use your Technical skill to salvage damaged mechs for parts, but it all pales in comparison to capitalism.

Anyway, the shocking twist during one of the later training missions is that Pacifica is invaded by armies from a neighboring stellar state (the Draconis Combine, if you know Battletech) and all of a sudden Jason's father is missing presumed dead and he's a fugitive. The character advancement part of the game is over, and now it's time for story and combat. Lots of combat.

BLAM💥

Crescent Hawks' Inception's combat is grid- and turn-based, involving inputting a series of commands and then hitting "Begin Fight" to let it all play out. Personal combat is relatively simple, with just commands to move and fight--and as I said above, once you buy an anti-mech weapon and armor you're basically invincible in personal combat because the Kuritans will never use man-portable anti-mech weapons against you--but battlemech combat is more involved. You can walk, run, or jump, all of which presumably have different effects on your weapon accuracy and the accuracy of enemies' attacks against you (that's the way the tabletop wargame works), independently target each of your weapons at different targets, and then start the round. All participants will take their actions, damage is applied, and the next round begins. Against humans damage comes off a general hit point pool, but mechs have locational damage, at least to determine what weapons and systems are hurt. Enemies can disable specific weapons, destroy heat sinks to make heat management more difficult, ruin armor, and otherwise slowly reduce a mech into slag.

The problem is that even before I knew the secret systems of this game, combat was extremely easy. Other than the first battle against the Kuritan invaders, which is designed to be so overwhelmingly hard that the far better choice is running, every battle in the game is level-scaled. If Jason is on foot, he'll only ever have to fight enemies on foot. If he and his teammates are in mechs, they will never face a superior force. And when you add in the ability to customize mechs at the Mechit Lube stations scattered around Pacifica, taking off machine guns and slamming on multiple extra lasers, it's very easy to end up with a suite of custom overpowered mechs who could easily take on twice their tonnage in enemies and win, which you'll never have to do anyway. Fortunately there's an autobattle option which allows both turning off the graphics and battle messages, so whenever I was attacked I could resolve the combat in a few seconds, but that doesn't alleviate its problems. Like Final Fantasy I, if there are a ton of options available but most of them are so suboptimal it's almost never worth choosing them, then there might as well not be any options at all.

In a very short time after leaving the ruins of the Citadel, I was attempting to run from every battle and, if I failed, just setting up autobattle with no graphics. My overwhelming laserpower would slaughter the Kuritans, my technical expert would salvage enough gear that I could repair my mechs back to full without having to visit, and I'd be good as new for the next bunch of saps who tried to fight me. There's no adaptive difficulty or world state change in response to your actions, so combat never gets harder as you wander around assembling members of the Crescent Hawks and literally destroying dozens and dozens of valuable mechs. I mentioned above getting Excellent in both piloting and gunnery but honestly the exact same thing happened as a child when I had Good and Adequate skills there. For a Battletech game, designed for tactical combat, incentivizing me to ignore it since it was all a forgone conclusion was a disappointment.

It's not the greatest disappointment, though.

I'd honestly rather just do the Towers of Hanoi.

The plot of Crescent Hawks' Inception involves a message from Jeremiah Youngblood to Jason containing the location of a secret Star League cache of Lost Technology, so Jason spends the first part of the game locating and assembling a team of former Crescent Hawks, attempting to decode the damaged message, tracking down the location of the cache, and gaining entrance. This is the RPG portion.

The second portion changes the game completely. None of your weapons, armor, skills, mechs, or party members matter anymore. It transitions into a puzzle game, with a maze filled with locked doors and dozens of computer consoles containing various numbered color codes. Each door requires a specific combination of color codes to open, and while it tells you when you have the wrong code, and it tells you when you have the correct code for any individual color, that's all the hints you get. There's no way to determine whether RED 21 applies to any particular door other than imprinting it on your keycard and running around trying it on every locked door in the cache, which leads to a very long and very frustrating sequence of trying cards at doors, backtracking, trying new cards, absolutely making sure you don't accidentally overwrite any part of a color sequence you have, and probably drawing a map out on paper. I beat this when I was a child with overwhelming kid patience--even though I had a whole shareware CD full of games, I bashed my head against the puzzle and slowly ground it down until I finished it. Game won!

That doesn't make it good, though. Brute-force trial and error was assumed in a lot of early games, when there were simply far fewer games coming out and existing in total and a single game might have to last someone for months, and nowadays it's rightly considered to be inferior design. But the real problem is the bait-and-switch. The part that drew me into Crescent Hawks' Inception as a child was the perceived scale of the world and the tactical mech combat, and at the end of the game literally all of that is abandoned for a giant puzzle using the free-roaming world scale. If this were a text adventure and I could just type S S S E S E N W USE CONSOLE Y E S W N W OPEN DOOR or whatever I would have had a slightly better attitude towards it--though in that case I absolutely would have needed a paper map--since I wouldn't have needed to physically traverse the space. And to top it all off, if you save and reload, it strips the color codes from your keycard and puts you back at the beginning of the maze!

As it was, I used a walkthrough. I beat it as a child--I don't have anything to prove.

Posting this picture is legal thanks to Harmony Gold U.S.A., Inc. v Harebrained Schemes LLC.

Crescent Hawks' Inception is not good by modern standards. It tries to do too much and is pulled in too many direction as a result, and none of the systems are particularly good. The sequel, Crescent Hawks' Revenge, is a proto-RTS (or maybe Real Time Tactics since there's no base building) that came two years before Dune II and is legitimately fun even today, but there's really no reason to play this game other than nostalgia.

And the truth is, sometimes nostalgia isn't enough. My usual verdict when going through old games I love is that there's something fun there even if there is a clunky interface, design decisions hobbled by the period technology, or squandered potential, but Crescent Hawks' Inception was shallow even when I played it as a child, I just didn't know any better. I spent most of this playthrough either waiting around or actively avoiding engaging with the game systems, and the times I was forced to engage with the systems--the puzzle, for example--were annoying. I'm not sure I enjoyed much of my time with the game at all, which is always a risk when you replay old games. Now I'm wondering why I did play this through multiple times as a child and didn't try to beat Ancients I: Deathwatch, Caverns of Kroz, Dark Ages, or Blake Stone.

I recently learned about Battlemercs, a game in Crescent Hawks' Inception's art style but with modern design decisions. And XPingtronX bought me the recent Harebrained Schemes Battletech game a couple years ago. I should play one of those and leave Crescent Hawks' Inception in the past where it belongs.