When I first played through Phantom Brigade’s demo, I realized it did what I’d wanted from a game for years. It’s a turn-based game that uses the magic of our computer boxes to create great action scenes. Not only that, but they’re action scenes featuring giant robots, and astute readers may have noticed that I love them. (I should add that screencasting was an absolute joy, as I scrubbed back and forth on the timeline each round, rotating and zooming the camera to find the perfect angle for the giant mechs to collide and explode.)
There’s nothing particularly novel about how the Phantom Brigade does this. It’s essentially a mix of Frozen Synapse and Into the Breach, with some Battletech elements. You have a squad of mechs that engage in turn-based combat with enemy mechs and tanks. Instead of moving and shooting each unit in sequence, you plan your squad’s moves in every five-second turn, then press the execute button and watch your tactical brilliance unfold in real time. Where Into the Breach comes into play, aside from large bots, is that you’re able to see your opponent’s predictive moves. Forewarning is forewarning, as they say, and you can use your Cassandra-like divination abilities to break out of enemy fire arcs and line up your own perfect kill shot.
This hardcore combat, when it works, is absolutely bloody brilliant. Your mechs weave through the stream of bullets, sliding past each other with precision, unleashing lasers, bullets and missile-scented death. Once you get the hang of the slightly esoteric melee attacks, your sword-swinging units can swoop over opposing mechs and slice off limbs, or charge at lighter foes, knocking them down, and then quickly eliminating them. Get it wrong, usually because you missed the fact that you were about to have two of your units collide with each other, or accidentally wandered into the stream of bullets, and chaos ensued.
Each round is a small puzzle to solve (though neither as precise nor as punishing as Into the Breach), and your reward is a joyful carnival of carnage, where you It can be savored in slow motion from any angle. Or learn to find out where the hell you screwed up, you big ass.
Mechs are not unique models per se, but rather generic frames equipped with different armor and weapon combinations. You can make a lively robot with paper-thin armor, a pugnacious fighter, or a hulking cannon on legs. The system is pretty simple, with two weapon and four armor slots, and the option to plug in different gubbins like reactors and radiators. It’s fun and flexible, but irritatingly a clunky interface that never displays exactly the information you want when you want it, and always seems to take a few more clicks to do anything.
Sadly, the sloppy UI extends to the rest of the game. Assigning orders in battle is inexplicably inconsistent. To schedule an attack, you place it on the unit’s small planning timetable, then choose a target. simple! To move, you just click where you want to move to, but you can’t choose when to move. Instead, you have to assign wait times, which, like moves, don’t sit directly on the timeline, but require you to draw a line across the map. This is weird and unintuitive.
The campaign UI isn’t much better, and probably feels worse because it’s by far the weakest part of the game. There’s a barebones plot about your homeworld being invaded, and your elite mech unit with experimental predictive technology is the one to free it. That means driving slowly in a big truck, engaging (or avoiding) enemy patrols and hitting spots to drive the occupying forces away.
The map itself is divided into provinces. Once you’ve softened up the invaders in a province, you can call in the resistance to take it back, triggering a timed race in which you must win a certain number of objectives before the resistance suffers too many defeats. Once you liberate a province, you can move on to the next. Rinse and repeat. There are some random events that usually come down to sitting in one spot for hours of game time and/or dropping some supplies in hopes of getting a reward or avoiding a penalty. In either case, they don’t seem to be worth bothering with. Potential loss or gain never matters, and neither your pilot nor any anonymous NPCs have enough personality for you to care.
The biggest problem is that it gets repetitive very, very quickly. After a few provinces (20+) you’ve most likely locked down some good buildings, and you’ll be ready to deal with anything the enemy throws at you. While tinkering with your mech is fun, there’s no real reason to do it after a while, especially since the AI isn’t.
Enemies can’t seem to do anything but charge and shoot at you, let alone respond to your tactics. During my fight, the entire enemy force initially decided to fire on one of my units, which was safely hidden behind a large mountain, and then continued to do so while the rest of my team took them out one by one. It would be easy to completely avoid any and all damage, but I find myself getting more and more sloppy over time, as mech damage repairs quickly after a fight, and only completely destroying parts can have any real impact.
Worst of all, the system is very easy to exploit. The heavy mech with its blade can easily stun any light or medium opponent, while the heavy spin cannon does so much damage that a mech equipped with it can easily outlast any opponent, whether backfired or How about a tiny amount of damage from overheating.
All in all, the feeling is that while Phantom Brigade has a great core, everything else falls short, like a perfectly cooked burger surrounded by limp lettuce and stale buns. I can’t remember the last time I was so disappointed in a finished game after playing such a great demo. On the bright side, these problems seem to be fixable, because the foundation is very strong. Just a few tweaks to the UI and a few polishes to the campaign could make the Box of rocks AI a little more forgiving. As it stands, this is definitely a game that fans of turn-based strategy and mechs should try, but not necessarily one they should buy. Wait and see if you can figure out how.