Mech warfare is always fun to watch. It’s even better when you can be a part of it and honestly, we don’t have ENOUGH mech-based action games. Thankfully, all is not lost as Brace Yourself Games had something lovely in store for fans of hot, steamy mech on mech action with Phantom Brigade at PAXEast.
Phantom Brigade is a hybrid turn-based and real-time strategy RPG where players are on a mission to liberate their country from an invading military force. The representative who showed me the game told me the enemy force didn’t have a name, so we’ll just call them the Red Team. During combat situations, players must plan out their next 5 seconds of the engagement. The game offers players a look at what MIGHT happen over those next five seconds but it’s not guaranteed. Almost anything can happen to alter the course of those next five seconds.
Predict the Future to turn the tide.
While playing the demo, it felt like there is quite a lot that factors into combat situations. Those things include visibility, terrain, unexpected consequences, and even physics. While you’re planning out your next turn, time is frozen and from there, you can interact with your team. The game will briefly show you what the enemies plan on doing and you’ll want to work around those movements.
Phantom Brigade requests that you decide carefully and examine each encounter from every angle. Enemies are displayed by a red hologram that will move around the map. Unlike games like X-COM, how an enemy intends to attack is displayed as a red cone. The cone exists as a way to show you where the bullets may go and there’s no guarantee a shot will land in any one specific area depending on how wide the cone is. There’s no percentage counter to go by and other things in the environment, like trees and buildings as well as the distance, alter the effectiveness of the weaponry in the game. So, if you scrub through time and see a unit that’s going to be fired upon, make sure to move.
Selecting a friendly unit will allow you to issue orders to that pilot. With the exception of the movement command, you’ll need to place their commands on a bar. The bar works like a timeline, displaying the next five seconds. Choosing to attack an enemy with one of their two weapons will show you their effective range. Placing your units and ordering the right commands at spot in time is essential to outwitting your enemies and achieving victory. If you’re confident enough in your plan, you can execute your plan of attack and watch the chaos unfold. However, when those five seconds end, time freezes again, meaning anything happening also freezes in time.
At the end of the demo, the rep showed me a special save they had made further into the game. This was to showcase the wider variety of weapons and just how chaotic engagements could get. I got to see beam weaponry, plasma launchers, and melee weapons. After he planned out his first five seconds, things immediately didn’t work out. One of his units stepped in front of the unit with the plasma launcher. This unit took friendly fire but was mostly okay. It went on to destroy a missile launching tank whose missiles froze right above a mech he had armed with a sniper rifle.
What I wish I did see was the physics in action. At the booth, they were playing a trailer of the game, and in that trailer, I saw damaged mechs that were missing limbs, shields reflecting beam weaponry, and most interesting to me, a mech colliding with a tank and falling into a building. All of the things were confirmed by the representatives that those things are in the game. One thing that isn’t in the game and I feel is a missed opportunity, is a more vital part of mech damage.
To destroy (or knockout) an enemy mech, players need to destroy a mech’s torso. This also means you can damage a mech’s arms and legs and taking them out hinders them immensely. Losing an arm means losing a weapon and a leg, mobility. You can’t, however, destroy a mech’s head and that feels like a vital part of combat. It would be interesting if you could as a way to hinder a pilot’s visibility but alas. You can’t specifically target an enemy’s limbs so it’s all dependent on the weapon you use. A leg can be lost by an explosion or even an inconveniently placed sniper’s bullet.
Spreading Hope Will Save Your Country
I was shown a little bit of how the overworld works and I found it quite interesting. The country is split up into territories, and it’s up to your team and mobile armory to travel the country, liberating them. Each new territory you go into, you go in with little to no knowledge of the terrain. Your mobile armory is equipped with a scanner however and as you close in on unidentified points of interest you begin to collect intel on them. Collecting enough intel will display information on the spot, allowing you to make a more informed decision. Liberating these locations gives you certain perks, supplies, and hope. When you raise enough hope, the territory will eventually be strong enough to overthrow its invaders.
Each territory you go into gets progressively harder, with the one I was shown being level 12. My reps level was eight, so it made sense that the battle he showed me was so chaotic. Another thing I noticed was that random narrative events also happen in enemy territories. I got to see one about a farm that had been taken over by the Red team and my rep could either go and run them off, give the character requesting help supplies to survive, or just leave them behind. My rep chose to drive off in his mobile armory which made me chuckle.
The Red team will also try to pursue you but your mobile armory has some specific modes it can utilize to avoid detection. Army bases will send out patrols to hunt you down and much like your scanner, getting close to a base will alert the enemy and they’ll start scanning you as well. The mobile armory can enter into stealth mode which slows down the enemy’s detection speeds. Using overdrive will allow you to close the gap faster allowing you to engage with your targeted points of interest faster. Doing these things will stop the enemy from collecting valuable information on you, yet they felt situational at best. Each ability drains your armory’s battery, but they can be improved upon.
When you’re outside of combat, you can also upgrade the armory and customize your pilots as well as their mechs. My representative showcased a few liveries for me so you don’t always have to be the Blue team. It, unfortunately, doesn’t seem like you can tweak the liveries. However, from what I could see, there were quite a few to choose from. When you’re all done looking fabulous, you can also change out your mech’s equipment and there’s a wide variety of things you can do to make sure they’re equipped for any situation.
Well that Was a lot to Unpack
A lot is going on in Phantom Brigade, and it looks great. The game is currently in early access on the Epic Games Store, and the developers have quite a bit planned for the future. On the roadmap, I saw graphical updates, base upgrades, pilot features, and AI tweaks. When I played the game, it wasn’t the prettiest looking game, and the intro cutscene could use some work, so the visual updates will help out a lot.
There are already a lot of features in the game, I know I’m forgetting to mention some things. The developers have absolutely crafted something unique. It will be interesting to see how the product turns out in the end. When questioned about the possibility of Phantom Brigade coming to consoles, my rep couldn’t give me a solid answer. While you can indeed play the game now thanks to early access, we weren’t given a specific window on when the 1.0 patch would be finalized. Rest assured though, Brace Yourself Games his hard at work on the future of Phantom Brigade.
