BattleTech - The Crescent Hawks Revenge

Dune II as the mother of RTS games. You've heard that sentence a hundred times. It's an oversimplification that does injustice to games that were created years before — and BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Revenge from 1989 is exactly the case where genre historians should sit down and reconsider what they actually know.

Westwood Studios were working on the BattleTech license at the time and built upon their previous title Crescent Hawks' Inception — an RPG/adventure where you guided Jason Youngblood through various adventures in the mech universe. Revenge raises the stakes: from an individual's perspective, you move into the commander's chair. You control a group of mechs, infantry, and vehicles in turn-based and real-time battles set in the characteristic BattleTech world, where giant bipedal machines with PPC cannons and missile launchers decide the fate of planets.

The gameplay combines strategic planning with direct unit control in real time — at a time when most strategy games were either purely turn-based or simple action affairs. You navigate the map, issue orders, manage the heat economy of your mechs (this is BattleTech, without overheating it wouldn't be authentic) and try to complete missions with what you have. Controls are frankly challenging after thirty-five years. The interface bears clear marks of an era when "user friendly" hadn't been translated yet. It takes patience and willingness to read the manual — the physical, paper one.

What Revenge brought was unusual for its time: a genre mix that had no precise name back then. Part of the community probably missed it precisely because it stood firmly in neither the turn-based nor the action camp. Today, it's exactly this quality that makes it a historical artifact worth attention. It has aged unevenly — visually it looks exactly like a DOS game from 1989, the Sound Blaster music does what it can, but the very idea of multi-layered real-time strategy holds up surprisingly well.

I'd recommend it to BattleTech universe fans and people interested in how the real-time strategy genre actually came into being — not from a single source, but gradually, from various attempts by different studios. Play Inception first, the context is worth it. And then dive into Revenge knowing you're looking at one of the early pieces of the mosaic that Dune II, three years later, would assemble into the picture everyone knows.