Phantom Brigade released out of Early Access on Steam last year. But like quite a few titles these days, it may have pushed through those gates a little bit too soon, especially given the uniqueness and complexity found in its combat engine. It could have benefited from a few more months of testing and development. However, Phantom Brigade has released a massive 1.2 update, which fixes a lot of quirks as well as adds a really nice boss battle type of mission that really shows off what the title can do. It’s definitely worth playing now, especially for mech combat enthusiasts looking for something a bit new to experience.
The combat engine is going to get most of the attention from players, but the story of Phantom Brigade is also surprisingly interesting. Players take on the role of a group of young people guarding a small outpost and town on the edge of their country’s territory. They are basically the equivalent of the Army Reserves, and you get the feeling that they are not exactly frontline troops. They do have access to combat mechs, but they are mostly smaller, more agile machines equipped with (for a mech anyway) small weapons. When their country comes under a massive attack, they are able to escape into the woods with their mechs intact during a dramatic cinematic cutscene after fighting off overwhelming odds in the tutorial mission.
And so, the plot of Phantom Brigade is kind of like the movie Red Dawn because only the kids in the resistance have access to combat mechs and military training. After the tutorial, time advances and we see that the entire country has been taken over by a rival nation, with only the kids in the so-called Phantom Brigade still able to put up a fight. So, the kids decide to take the battle to the attackers and liberate their land, one city and province at a time. In addition to having an interesting plot, it also relies heavily on cinematic cutscenes that set the mood at various points in the story, which makes for a nice little bit of extra excitement to help color in the world details.
Phantom Brigade is a turn-based strategy game, but it is also one that’s a bit of a hybrid. Travel on the main map where you plan how your campaign will unfold is done in real time, although you can pause the game to help assess the situation better. And then when you drop into combat, it goes into a turn-based strategy interface, but one where you are able to predict how enemies will move and attack each round. You schedule your moves (and watch the predicted moves and attacks of the enemy) in five second intervals where each millisecond is intricately planned out. Then when you are ready, you execute those plans and time advances forward for five seconds.
You might think that being able to predict in Phantom Brigade what the enemy will do, which is explained by the presence of a very smart computer program installed inside your mechs, would give you an incredible advantage, and it does. But it’s not a fully god-like power. In fact, looking at the battlefield in five second intervals can be a little bit frustrating at times. You can get painted into virtual corners by the enemies, who almost always outnumber your squad. Yes, you know that five tanks are going to take a shot at you, but you might not be able to do much about that in the next five seconds of combat. It’s also challenging to work together with the other mechs in your squad since they tend to move at different speeds and have different optimal weapon ranges, although mastering that skill is a key to victory.
Mechs generally have several actions that they can take during a five second round, starting with movement. Plotting out movement during a planning stage is pretty easy, and it involves simply right clicking where you want to go. Your mech will lumber to that spot, leaving behind a long blue bar in the time plotting window. The next thing you will probably want to do is shoot, and some mechs have primary and secondary weapons. Shooting involves telling the game when in the timeline you want to start firing. This puts the entire shoot action, which is red for primary weapons, on the time plotting chart above the blue movement bar. You can then look on the battlefield and see what should happen if you shoot at that point in time, which will change depending on where your mech is standing, and where the enemy will probably be in the timeline at that point. You can’t overlap fire actions, so you have to wait in the timeline for the first shooting action to finish before dropping in a new one right behind it on the timeline.
Mechs equipped with secondary weapons or defensive actions can use those as well during the planning stage. This includes things like firing a pistol (a mech-sized pistol) or raising a shield to try and block damage coming in from a certain direction – a handy skill if your mech has one. Remember that scenario when five tanks were all about to shoot? A shield would be a great thing to have to counter some of that damage.
Primary weapons are generally much more powerful than secondary ones, but sometimes have minimum range considerations, which is why you might need to draw a pistol if combat gets really close. And like in most mech games, your giant death-dealing robots can easily overheat if you don’t monitor that carefully. Powerful main weapons generally produce a lot more heat than secondary weapons or actions, which is another reason why you might need to mix and match them when shooting during combat.
The boss-battle mechanics that were introduced with the new 1.2 update are really exciting and add much-needed variety to the mission types. The bosses are huge mechs bristling with weapons and special actions, and it takes a lot of good planning to try and bring them down, including not just how to attack them but where your shots should be landing to weaken those behemoths. It’s a great addition to the title, with those missions being a lot of fun to try and tackle.
In addition to just combat, players will also be upgrading their mech and managing their pilots. After a battle you can find new components that can be added to your arsenal as you build out the perfect combat machines for your squad. Managing both your pilots and their machines, adds an element of role-playing to the title, although it’s very much a secondary focus behind the combat.
While Phantom Brigade is an interesting hybrid that could bring different types of mech game enthusiasts together, it also could potentially alienate all of them. For example, those like GiN columnist Vincent Mahony enjoy realtime combat mech titles like Megaton Musashi W: Wired, while others like myself enjoy more strategic, turn-based combat titles like Battletech. Phantom Brigade is not really like either of those extremes, although it’s closer to the Battletech end of the range.
The interface can also be a little overly complex to manage. Many times, I ended up struggling with it while trying to squeeze as many actions as I could into the timeline and having it simply not cooperate with me. Other times I would forget to fully plot out the movement or actions for one of my squad, leaving him standing there taking hits and not doing anything at all for the next five seconds, to the great detriment of my tactical battlefield success. Phantom Brigade warns you if you have not planned any actions at all with a mech in your squad before you start time for real but does not if you left a bunch of holes or inefficiencies in your planning, which is surprisingly easy to do as the game progresses and more units come to the field.
Phantom Brigade brings something new to the mech fighting genre and should appeal to those who like to micromanage every aspect of their turn-based combat down to the second. It’s a lot of fun to play, especially now that the 1.2 update has both squished a lot of its early bugs and also added impressive boss fights to the already impressive battlefield.