No one’s making a new BattleTech videogame any time soon, so I’ll console myself with this $18 bundle of stuff for the tabletop RPG

Remember Harebrained Schemes’ turn-based BattleTech game? That was great. 85% great if you listen to our BattleTech review from back when it came out. It is also, now, the best part of a decade old, and there’s no sign of anything like it on the horizon, especially with Paradox cutting Harebrained loose in 2023.

But will I move on? Absolutely not. Instead, I will recreate the magic in an only mildly tragic way with the latest Humble Book Bundle: the BattleTech RPG Collection, which offers access to BattleTech in its original, tabletop form in exchange for a loosely variable amount of several major global currencies.

The tabletop experience is, well, not a million miles off the videogame one. You hop in a big, stompy mech and use it to destroy your enemies, who often have their own big, stompy mechs. You roll dice, move around a tabletop map, and occasionally yell ‘alpha strike’ when you decide to say screw it and just use every weapon you have bolted onto you at once.

All good fun, and you can get a hefty stack of 20 virtual books—containing “everything you need to enjoy the BattleTech experience, including lore books and new campaigns”—for $18 (£13.89). If that’s a bit steep, you can pick up a more svelte, seven-book collection for $10 (£7.71), or a three-book bundle for a buck (or 77p, in these blighted isles).

In return, you get all the books you buy as PDFs for you to load onto your nearest tablet, laptop, phone, ereader, smart fridge and what-have-you, because I guess the publishing industry has yet to figure out how to get Denuvo onto its products. It’s not a bad deal, to be honest, especially for a series as beloved as BattleTech, and with no videogame in the setting anywhere near, it’s probably the best you’ll get for a while.