Each and every limb and section of your mech can be customized, using salvaged pieces from captured facilities or salvaged from downed foes, and combinations of manufacturers and styles. The other big element is the mech customization, which at least to me, was pretty insane. That means you will often have to decide if you can afford to spend 6 hours of game time resting your pilots, or risk it all to keep pushing.
Whenever you are spending time in the world view, time is constantly ticking, and the enemy is ever moving to fortify their positions, or perhaps reclaim turf that you previously cleared. You mech pilots will be fatigued, and the only way to rest them is to head into a liberated providence, and then set them to rest. When you’re not on the battlefield, there’s quite a bit of micromanagement to do. You’re gonna want to harvest, and harvest often, because upgrading and maintaining your mechs is an integral to what makes Phantom Brigade so satisfying. While it’s certainly fun to see an enemy mech explode in a giant ball of fire, that means you’re unlikely to salvage any useable parts from its metallic husk after the battle. The combat itself is pretty stock standard, at least what I’ve seen in my eight or so hours with the game thus far, except for on particular element – you don’t want to totally destroy you enemies. It’s a simple, and elegant system that balances the fact you have this incredible knowledge, but you can’t necessarily finish things in a turn or two. This ensures that you can’t spam the attack over and over in a single turn, lest your mech be suffering sustained damage form overheating. To balance out the fact that you know where your enemies will at least move to, each of your actions causes the heat level of your mech to rise. Seeing where your enemies will end up by the end of the turn, and changing your mech’s movements accordingly is a surreal and frankly, awesome experience, turning each and every move into a fantastic puzzle system of how can I shield myself, while also outputting maximum damage. The interesting thing here is that because of future tech reasons, you can predict your enemy’s movements via a timeline, which is where Phantom Brigade really gets its hooks in. Each time you attack a facility or a patrol group, the game shifts to the battlefield, where you issue commands to your mechs, as they dash, run, shoot, and shield their way to victory. Your mobile base roams these lands, discovering patrol units and facilities that need to be reclaimed to sway the balance of power in that providence. When you start a new game, the lands and enemy squads are randomized which means there’s going to be some decent replayability when the game does hit version 1.0.Īt the macro level there’s a world map that has the country broken up into providences, each with a specific threat level. You are the commander of the last surviving mech squad in unspecified-Scandinavian-inspired-country, as an oppressive enemy faction has taken over. Phantom Brigade is at its core a mech strategy game that instantly feels familiar, but it also subverts others in the genre with ease. If that doesn’t make any sense, and let’s be honest, why should it – I want you to imagine that the developers threw the combat and tactics from Frozen Synapse, the intricate mech fetishism of Battletech, and the timeline editing of Adobe Premiere into a blender to create the perfect cocktail, complete with layers of strategic depth, endless customization, and a garnish of humanity to make it really pop. Phantom Brigade is a hybrid turn-based meets real-time strategy game with a heavy layer of RPG elements, with a dash of Roguelike sentiments, and heavy mechs to boot. Currently running in Early Access via Epic Games, I try to answer the question – is Phantom Brigade worth it? Phantom Brigade is a huge departure that put this Canadian studio on the map, which is ridiculously exciting to see.
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