Mechwarrior: Dark Age #28: Fire at Will (A Battletech Novel)

 (4 customer reviews)

The big problem I had with Mechwarrior was that it departed too much from Classic Battletech in story as well as design (sure, spend twenty-five years building up to something huge and then just skip it because the new minatures sure look cool...that God for Classic Battletech). I mean there was a time when the thought of a hundred battlemech regiments waging a Sphere-wide conflict was not so far fetched. Then along comes Mechwarrior and you replace battlemech regiments with tiny engagements where the fate of a planet is decided by a single fracking Tri-cycle or souped up cargo loader.

And the story was equally reduced. No longer a game of thrones Mechwarrior Dark Age reduced it to a game of inches.

Well finally they are getting back to their roots. What...thirty novels in and only in the last few have a larger, more dynamic story come about. This is one such. Power, politics, business and war all mixed in with battlemechs and planetary assaults. If you...Read more

_Fire At Will_ continues the focus of the MW:DA series on the
actions surrounding the borders between the Lyran Commonwealth, the
(formers) Free Worlds League, and (to a lesser extent) the Republic of the
Sphere. This is a marked departure from the start of the series, which
focused on the Republic alone; but this also has made for more interesting
books, with more politics and wider-scale action, more along the lines of
the Battletech novels published just before the MW:DA time jump.

In this case, the novel focuses on the Lyran invasion of the
FWL. As we learned in _Pandora's Gambit_, the League is finally beginning
to re-merge into a single political force once again, after decades of
internal fighting; but the associated saber-rattling has offered a
much-desired excuse for the Lyran government to pre-emptively invade their
neighbours.

I was somewhat surprised at how well this novel fit in with...Read more

Fire at Will follows the Lyran decision to take war to the Marik fiefdoms; the seperate factions of Marik that all claim their stake to a unified House Marik. The novel starts slowly and seems to threaten to be another slow book that may be difficult to finish.

However Fire at Will does a good job of brining you in and holding your attention as the story progresses. There is good mech combat in telling of the story and interesting use portrayal of strategy, something that is missing from some of the other MW:DA novels. It is worth a read and will leave you satisfied once the final page is turned.