These campaigns have their own stories, characters and twists and turns, and can give you a lot of rewards and experience.

The first DLC, Flashpoint, adds a number of new story-based mini-campaigns (aka flashpoints) to the game. For newcomers I'd recommend following the story, which does a better job of managing the difficulty curve of the game. This mode is fun for veteran players who know what they are doing, as they can immediately access some of the DLC material that is otherwise gated until you finish the campaign. The game also gives you the opportunity to start in 'Career Mode,' which jettisons the storyline altogether in favour of a new setup with you taking on the task of setting up your mercenary company from scratch and guiding them across the Rimward Periphery without any story material to worry about. There are more mid-game special events to liven things up, and the DLC missions and features integrate into the campaign, giving you a greater variety of maps to fight on, as well as more mechs and weapons to deploy in battle. There is a more granular difficulty setting for those who find the game too much of a cakewalk or too tough. The most notable is that the game's engine has been reworked and a number of new options presented, which dramatically speed up gameplay by allowing you to skip more tedious animations or remove mid-battle animated sequences altogether. The Mercenary Collection, via the three expansions included within, immediately eliminates these problems via a host of new features. The original game did have problems, though, with too-long animations and a difficulty curve that was less of a curve and more of a barbed-wire wall, with occasional spikes making progress difficult without a lot of tedious grinding. The game is effectively XCOM: Pacific Rim, and is every bit as fun and compelling as that sounds. The game contains a number of interesting, interlocking systems which gives rise to an immense amount of satisfying player choice, realised via chunky, engaging combat missions. Over the course of a lengthy story-driven campaign, interspersed with huge numbers of side-missions and procedurally-generated jobs, you build up a mercenary company from scratch, hiring pilots, training their skills, buying or salvaging more BattleMechs, equipping them and fighting in detailed, tactically tense engagements on a variety of planets. MechWarriors are the elite troops of the 31st Century, a time period when five great powers and numerous smaller ones and mercenaries fight for control of the Inner Sphere, the vast region of space claimed by humanity (there are no aliens in the BattleTech universe). These maps add an incredible new layer of fun and strategy to the game, and they’ve very quickly come to be my favourite part of not just the expansion, but the game as a whole.To recap, the game has you playing a MechWarrior, the pilot of a BattleMech, a massive, building-sized walking death machine.

We wrote about Urban Warfare when it launched in June, with Miguel saying, “Anyone looking to add some more action to their BattleTech experience absolutely needs to pick up Urban Warfare, if only for the new city environments it adds. The first of these introduced more side content away from the main campaign, while the latter brought a new and destructible city setting for your mech combat to take place in. The expansion rounds out the game’s Season Pass, which has previously seen the release of the Flashpoint and Urban Warfare DLC. Mitch Gitelman, BattleTech Game Director and co-founder of Harebrained Schemes explained, “The new mini-campaign weaves its way through your mercenary career to the point when you become an elite MechCommander, capable of facing off with two of the most legendary MechWarriors in BattleTech history.”

Battletech urban warfare campaign