Phantom Brigade is the best mech tactics game I have ever played. It captures a particularly desperate and sudden form of mechanical violence. It makes you feel endlessly powerful, allowing you to see five seconds into the future, and then brings you low when you cannot do enough to change it. Your mechs change and break over time, becoming beautiful and terrible Frankenstein’s monsters. The game’s physics driven combat is extremely technically impressive, and wildly expressive. It is, at first blush, everything a mech fan could ask for.
I hear this game is very messy on launch, but I’m hoping 2.0 or whatever will work on SteamDeck. I spent years listening to this podcast rave about BattleTech and I never had a PC, I’m not going to do the same thing with Phantom Brigade, which has a voxel look that I think is really cool.
Renata talked about you shooting fascists with giant robots and while so far the fascism isnt the most overt in my playthrough its pretty fun, even if i cant actually figure out how to make any builds lol
I didn’t follow the development at all (other than what was mentioned on Waypoint pods) so I have no idea what the post-launch roadmap looks like, or if there even is one. As it stands it’s a perfectly playable game (questions of Steamdeck compatibility notwithstanding) but the turn-based tactics are way more fully developed than the extremely barebones, frankly boring campaign.
I’ve put a lot of hours into it in a short time because, well, it’s good! The battles feel great, as Ren’s article nails. But the campaign, the world, the pilots - they’re all nothing. There’s huge potential if the developer keeps working on it so a theoretical 2.0 version could be a hell of a thing, but right now any recommendation I’d give it would have the caveat that everything around the tactics is half-baked and if there’s any scope of them building on it, I’d probably have rather waited for that rather than playing this unfinished version.
I totally get this too. Why arent the fascists counterattacking? And what are the fascists doing? And who are they, what direction are they from, where is your base of operations?
Also i want more partisan shit i want to fight alongside a fucking technical mounted with mech weaponry. I want a fucking pickup truck added to the game!
