campaign is the story career is sandbox and mostly just missing a couple of the story missions

Campaign is the easiest way to obtain some mechs. They can still be obtained in career, but there's story missions in the campaign that guarantee getting them. I forget which ones, tho.

You can always play campaign then when you're done take that save into career mode.

Originally posted by Vinnie DAngelo:

You can always play campaign then when you're done take that save into career mode.

Although you do get double ups on some of the story driven missions.

Yeah, you could jump into the career mode if you don't care about the story and the career campaigns like Lancers and Rise are both self contained. If you want lore bits there's the news ticker that they added and some youtube videos which covers the stuff that isn't explained in the games.

If you want the story or to familiarize yourself with the world quicker then Campaign. If not Career. Honestly the story misses a lot of the marks, but it isn't their fault. This is a soft reboot and the major events for the time period they worked with were set in stone decades ago. So they had to come up with something else that wouldn't throw off the time line.

Battletech is going to feel different then other mech IPs, because the focuses aren't the same. The first version of Battletech was released in 1984 when people were very war weary. Therefor the main focus is on mechs as a deescalation of violence instead of an escalation of technology. Battletech mechs feel, and act as if we made bipedal tanks in the future. I wouldn't go so far as to call it realistic, but it has much more realism then the average mech IP. As for the other part to how mech combat in Battletech is a deescalation it primarily has the elite fighting in very expensive hardware when these groups are (or at least were) more than capable of wielding weapons that could destroy planets at a time, or could have armies in the trillions without batting an eye about it. That time period also means the moral alignments are different then most games which tend to focus on other time periods for inspiration.