Paramilitary mech wars are my favorite kind of wars.
Phantom Brigade is a game about commanding a squad of mech pilots and their big ass robots on a campaign to liberate your home country from a foreign super power.
The Nation of Fyrland has been invaded by the Kaskad Dominion, a larger, angrier military super power that wants Fyland’s land and stuff. After getting decked in a surprise attack, what’s left of the Fyrland Defense Force either flees the country or goes into hiding. YOU, in command of the Fyrland Freedom Fighters, must fight back against Kaskad with the use of your own mechs as well as the prediction technology, this game’s reason as to why you can see in the future.
Hilariously, this isn’t the original release of Phantom Brigade, this is the 2.0 redux of the original game. What originally released was this strange non-political political game about people talking about hope and freedom and looking heroically into the distant sunset. It was pretty funny, actually kind of lame with how melodramatic and forced everything felt.
I don’t even think your country or the invading empire even had a name, at least I don’t remember them having a name when I played this game via family share some years ago. It was just your cool freedom guys vs their not cool not-freedom guys.
I guess others agreed with me and the developers took it to heart, since the 2.0 release of the game actually has cool things like history and timelines and lore.
They actually went as far as to remove some cutscenes just to make the game flow better, or just because maybe they didn’t want to redo them. I personally thing its a major improvement.
Customization also got a major overhaul. Much like their original lore, pilot creation was sort of just there. You could pick a vaguely masculine or vaguely feminine person and then give them bad looking hair and something that sort of looked like facial hair. I always just ended up covering them with hats and glasses or helmets, something to make them look more like non-descript mooks, that took away a lot of the personalization. It was so lame that people just modded in their own portraits to use as pilots instead of the in game creator.
NOW, its much better. You can do the whole pronouns, body type thing, the facial hair doesn’t look like a teenager tried to grow a beard. You can make them fat, muscular, thin, change their eye shapes, jaw shape, cheek depth, its a way more thought out and usable system and I ended up making a few more unique pilots this time around.
The addition of pilot perks and abilities was also a good call, letting you personalize them even further. Your pilots can also gain buffs and debuffs depending the way things are going. So being injured too many times will give them certain fears or apprehensions they wouldn’t have had before.
“Getting to sleep in their favorite bunk” is also a bonus you can get when you camp out.
You move around in a rolling base, its kind of like the avenger from Xcom 2, only, y’know, on the ground. It’s where you keep your pilots and mechs and the hilariously huge 3d printer you use to make new mechs and gear.
After choosing a region to liberate, you roll around an overworld looking for trouble. You have a star system with more stars being more difficult missions but have the added benefit of clearing out the province quicker. Once you beat the Dominion back far enough you can break their hold on the region with a mission that can be anything from a big battle to a boss fight to blowing up trains because you hate trains.
Combat works like this. You assign a pilot to a mech and then send them out. You can deck out your mech down to the body parts, including its name and color. Light, medium, and heavy mech parts go together with what kind of weapon you want it to carry.
A medium mech with an assault rifle is basically just the mech bread and butter. You can have a fast mech with a shotgun or SMGs, a heavy mech with a cannon or a shotgun. You can give your mechs shields, you can have a knight mech with a sword and shield, or a mech with a firearm and an axe made specifically to kill enemy pilots in their cockpit because your pilot is one of those few people that don’t suffer PTSD from combat and this is how they make their money.
Each turn in combat is a 5 second intervel. You can pick where your mech moves and what they attack. Because of the game’s “prediction system” you can also see where the Kaskadians are moving in those 5 seconds. This lets you cut them off, catch them on a move, remove a limb before they can fire on one of your guys, stuff like that.
It gets a bit deeper, you can use things as cover and just let a building or rock side take the shots for you if you’re smart enough. Heavier mechs can just plow over lighter mechs on a charge, mechs with lighter weapons can fire multiple times a turn without overheating, cool stuff like that.
All in All. 2.0 Phantom Brigade is a neat game. I liked what I’ve played a lot, even if some of the mission types can eat dirt. Its a good gameplay loop because this is what you’re going to be doing ALL Campaign, so that’s nice. Its a huge improvement from what it originally was and I really appreciate just removing the “Freedom and hope” redundant speeches from the game.
If you’re really curious, you can still play Phantom Brigade 1.9 through the beta menu for the game. Its a cool novelty and I would suggest playing even for a little bit so you can see how far the game has come.
The 2.0 update elevates Phantom Brigade from a 6/10 to a bigger number, go ahead and pick one. It still has its issues, but this version is a much better game than what came out originally. Not that 1.0 to 1.9 were bad games, just not as good.
Winds on Neptune can blow faster than 1,200 miles an hour.
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