Author: Rich Meister
Phantom Brigade is a strategy mech game currently in early access on Epic with a familiar look and some gripping and unique concepts. I love mechs, and I love strategy games, so lucky for me, the two tend to come together a lot. I’m typically hesitant to get too invested in early access titles, but Phantom Brigade has a lot to offer even in its current stage.
Phantom Brigade (PC)
Developer: Brace Yourself Games
Publisher: Brace Yourself Games
Release Date: November 16, 2020 (Epic Store Early Access)
MSRP: $29.99
At a glance, Phantom Brigade seems like your pretty standard strategy game. The player controls a small squad of mechs in battle and plots out actions on a timeline. The real unique feature comes from a probability matrix device equipped in your team's mechs. This allows you to see slightly into the future and plan your actions around what the enemy will do. Once you plan out these actions on the timeline, every unit moves in real time.
This means you need to account for things like collision and can even fire your weapons while moving, a feature not a lot of tactics games try. To prevent you from spamming attacks, your units need to watch their heat output, which rises from every action. Overheating will result in the unit sometimes taking fatal damage.
Phantom Brigade can be punishing and is one of those games, much like X-COM, where you need to account for losses and sometimes be willing to sacrifice a unit. You travel in a small mobile command unit outside of battle, recruiting pilots and freeing cities from enemy control.
The endgame is focused around liberating the nation's capital, but there are a lot of territories even in this early version. To get by, you need to manage your pilot's health as well as the equipment and condition of your mechs, upgrading a skill tree that allows you to both move through the world with greater ease, produce more weapons and mech parts, and even carry more mechs.
The mech design is simplistic and very Gundam-inspired. You can even see the joints and Exo skeletons on these units; according to the devs we spoke with at PAX, making model kits for these mechs is something they’ve considered, and I’m ready to through my money at that project.
Phantom Brigade is tough and engaging, and even barring its full release; I got lost for over forty hours, having only scratched the surface. I’m excited for 1.0, but the game is more than worth your time if you’re a fan of mechs or tactics games, even in its current state.
[This review is based on an early access version of the game provided by the publisher]