It's level based, which I usually don't care for, and very map-tied and combat heavy, which makes the sheer difference in experience from the old standard all the more striking.

Probably the mecha help.

Because Lancer is very decisively a Mech Game; the very name coming from evocations of mounted combat. I think that the setting is the most interesting and striking thing it has to offer; other people I've talked to were equally firm that the polish of the mechanics and how well they work for mech combat far outshone the setting work, and while I disagree with them, they're wrong in a respectable and well-founded way, because Lancer is very good at being a mech game.

So. That setting.

The year is 5016u, five thousand and sixteen Earth - or, as the setting knows the world, Cradle - years since the foundation of the Committee of Union in the rebuilt ruins of a global apocalypse. Now, the Third Committee - ThirdComm - presides directly over the Metropolitan worlds linked by instantaneous Blinkgates, a nearly-post-scarcity society in accordance with the Three Utopian Pillars, and sends out nearlight starships full of volunteers on relief and uplift missions to the tens of thousands of worlds seeded by the extinction-wary FirstComm and fascist SecComm.

Much like Star Trek's Federation, ThirdComm are very decisively the good guys, but they're also a government with the occasional problems that brings, pirates, politics, and paracausal strangeness. SecComm conquered every other interstellar state it found, and genocided those it couldn't take over, and while ThirdComm is determined to reckon with and clean up all of the evil they threw a revolution to stop, and any other they find, it's a work in progress.

The core book has twenty-nine mechs included, the starting Everest from the 'Baseline' General Massive Systems and seven each from the three megacorps and one transhumanist cult that build such things.

Interplanetary Shipping-Northstar, IPS-N's, main in-setting hat is shipping and transport; they're by far the largest builder, owner, and operator of civilian interstellar ships, used to expand the blinkgate network and make the decades-long sublight voyages to worlds where it doesn't reach yet. Their mechs tend to be robust and straightforward, and if the fact that all of them are named for famous pirates concerns you, then you are wise.

Smith-Shinano Corporation, SSC, is mainly invested in designer babies and genetic engineering, on every scale from the personal fertility clinic to manufacture of entire demographics to populate new colony worlds. Enough said. Their mechs tend to be elegant, precise, and stealthy, and art named after butterflies or moths.

Fucking HORUS (the fucking is not official, but I contend it is obligatory) is an unknowable cell-structured assemblage of shitposted memes, weird cults, and the profoundly alien cascaded Non-Human Persons (not mere AI's, please, sir) that they worship. There is at least one mech in their inventory that emailed itself to a cell's 3D printer from ten thousand years in the future, and it's not even the fuckiest thing they've unleashed on the galaxy. Their mechs make you reach for goddamn aspirin and sleep with a nightlight on, and are named after mythological monsters.

Finally, there's Harrison Armory. HA was founded using the corruptly ill-gotten gains of members of SecComm who managed to get out of dodge before the mobs with guillotines caught up to them, and their theme is basically 'we are going to use Standard Militaria To Commit Warcrimes'. They name their machines after famous conquering generals which honestly completes things better than I could.

...So, yeah. Lancer's setting is something people are either gonna love or hate, but I think that even without it the game is worth checking out.

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Iä! Iä! Moe fthagn!