Let's get a few things out of the way before I get into this review proper.
No, my air-con works perfectly... it is a regularly serviced and overhauled heavy duty unit that has to keep the air circulating simply so I can continue breathing despite Pat and Kenneth's verbal flatulence.
The second is that any mech that Patrick likes instantly becomes completely uncool on the grounds that he has no taste, unless of course he managed to get it right by complete accident and I therefore happen to agree with him as happened with the Antithesis.
But since both luminaries in the other desks of the office have decided to call me out on it, I can but respond with a more balanced view of the Boreas than the fanboys will give you.
The one thing that is glaringly obvious to anyone with an amount of skepticism when reading their oafishly exuberant exhortations is the fact that their appears to be no down side to these beasts.
Wrong!
So wrong that it should be covered in chocolate and made illegal.
The issue with the Boreas class is that they are horrendously hard to balance unless you have an almost unlimited budget. Put any kind of brakes on your spending and you are going to find yourself deficient in one or more areas, and the fact is that the basic bare Boreas build isn't all that flash. As both my compatriots have pointed out, the flexibility in the design comes from the huge amount of equipment slots. Slots that have to be filled, and filling slot means parting with hard earned or ill gotten gains.
I have piloted almost every mech there is (apart from Axebots, but you need to be a special kind of headbanger to get into one of those...), and it has to be said that I have never had such a pain in the posterior, baldness inducing, thankless task as I had when I was trying to get my first Boreas to do anything half decent in a fight.
And there is no point in putting all your coinage into one mech just to make it epic, because then the weak spot in the build simply moves to the other mechs in the line you skimped on. They get taken out, and suddenly your exorbitantly priced ultra white killer is on the receiving end of a 5 to 1 target practice session.Which means you have to pay 5 times the cost, because you need another 4 to plug that weakness. There's a reason why clans like Zeon employ the Boreas wall, and it is from those tactics and those kind of clans that we learned to fear the Boreas, or even the Torrent before them.
And even then they aren't infallible. No, I am not in the same class as Zeon, but I can break a Boreas wall, even if at times it may take my whole formation to do it, opponent depending. How, I'm not going to tell you, but it certainly isn't by using a contra Boreas strategy.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that a good mech, a decent mech, should be one that stands out when you go back over the replay in the way my 'Thesis do. It should be one that you are delighted to get as a raid prize like my Anubis were. It should be one that you keep in your main line for just too many levels even though they are past their prime because they are so much fun like my Smilodon's were.
So is it a decent mech?
Well, at the end of the day there is a reason why the best of the best use them, so in the right hands then yes they are. There is no denying that fact, they certainly aren't lemons.
But for the rest of us mere mortals, there are easier, better, cheaper options that can do the job without getting into the kind of resource based arms race that the big boys can afford and you are only ever going to come second at.
Like Pat, I own a number of these mechs.
There's a reason why some are still in the hanger unlevelled, passed over by other mechs that are more useful.
Submitted by David McCallum #701548