Phantom Brigade

So far pretty meh. The game offers no more depth than a traditional tactics game, but with tedious micromanagement and minimal QOL features to make it any easier.

Just finished the campaign. 5 stars from me. Turn based combat. Beautiful screens & backgrounds Did you like Battletech?? This game has a similiar mechanic, not exactly the same, but it's a pretty good follow up. Buy it - you wont be disappointed. Besides - its got mechs, its got a decent story line, its got mech and pilot builds and upgrades. Yeah - just buy it.

This is probably one of the most-dev-supported games I've ever seen. The free updates have been absolutely wild, I genuinely struggle to think of a game that has come further from its promising-but-somewhat-limited 1.0 release while not charging a cent for DLC. There's games I love that keep having development fueled by paid content - which I am happy to pay for - but the amount of fundamental systems Phantom Brigade was willing to rework in the name of making a better game is wild. At this point any further review I did would just be gushing about how cool certain moments can be. The newly released 2.2 has a jet that can't go vertically but can go through buildings, so I had a melee guy slam through the corner of a house into an enemy artillery mech, sending it sprawling backwards and crashing through half of a balcony as my melee guy barreled past and turned around, set his jets a-burnin' again, and sliced every single one of the mech's limbs off before it could stand back up. I would've ejected too.

It's cool. Devs are still working even years later, improving, something adding. Very cool.

You should give it a shot. It's fun. Plus the devs seem cool and put out free content updates.

I bought this game years ago came back for the 2.0 loved it and they are still actively adding new content one of the best games iv ever bought highly recommend if you enjoy turn based games

The most interesting part of Phantom Brigade is in how its combat functions. Yes, this is a turn based tactical game, but the entire thing is based around a time manipulation mechanic. Basically time freezes and you are able to see enemy movements, and plan your own five slow motion seconds in advance. After you get that all setup you press the execute button and watch the battle unfold. If you've ever looked at a video editing timeline and thought "wow, this would be so cool if it let me control a wargame" then you'll be pretty at home here. Brace Yourself Games, of Crypt of the Necrodancer fame, initially released the 1.0 version of this one back in 2023. February 28th to be exact. Now, 1.0 if I understand correctly had virtually no story elements and a more open world feel in general. I guess there was a simple cinematic giving a real basic world setup and then dumped you into a gameplay loop more akin to Mount and Blade. That being a large overworld map for you to retake back from enemies at your leisure. This first version of the game has changed in a few big areas when a 2.0 saw the light of day November 19th of 2025. Notably the overworld was replaced with a much more structured setup of liberating specific areas incrementally before moving on. Some areas are optional while others are mandatory as you make your way to the final faceoff in the capital city. This also includes some more story text but overall still feels pretty minimal. This 2.0 version is what I played. First off when you get into gameplay you'll be prompted to navigate a world map. This has a handful of province areas on it. Like Hedmark, the Western Pass, Breakfast or the Capital District. Once you move into these areas you get presented with a province map. In the province map you control the mobile base, which carries your crew around. While in the province map you'll sometimes get random events with a question mark. These are sometimes things like found supplies, or traders. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. While you're here you can also upgrade the mobile base and its workshop. Print armors faster, have more room for pilots and so on. The mobile base also functions as our garage for swapping out mech parts, leveling up pilots, camping to recover HP and so on. The goal here is to liberate the entire province. If you notice the top left of the screen we'll see a liberation meter. Completing events against the Kaskad Dominion will increase this liberation meter dependent on the difficulty of the combat scenario. The further along we get in the campaign the more events need to be completed for liberation. More events, that raise in difficulty, and grant less liberation. The balance in regards to this felt pretty decent for me, really. It felt like it incrementally raised the difficulty. On the otherhand some of the scenarios and maps really started to take their toll in terms of repetition. Increasing the number of event completion needed per area makes for a long play session if you get some bad rolls and repeat the same objectives. What I mean by that is that the enemy nodes within this map section disappear when they regroup overtime, and a new set is generated. When you move or camp time moves on, so we gotta think carefully about our moves. Basically this ramps up, first we do raiding missions, then move onto bigger liberation missions and finally have a showdown against a boss. Boom. Province provided freedom, baby. The real meat and potatoes is the combat sections themselves. There's a pretty decent variety of objectives, actually. Sometimes its pretty simple like enemy patrol moving around the map or an ambush on enemy supply lines but other times its great boss fights or slick assassinations. Pilots all have their own specific stats but I'll talk about that in a second. In the actual encounters you'll control up to four mechs. You control them via this timeline up to 5 seconds into the future. Movement, waiting, attacking, dodges, and so on, all has to be lined up on the timeline before hitting the execute button. After that you'll watch what you've setup play out. It's pretty easy to not pay attention and cause your mechs to friendly fire or crash into eachother. Luckily, if you do pay attention, like you're supposed to, you can see everything that is supposed to happen within the timeframe. Also actions will all have a heat rating, meaning you'll wreck yer mech if you try to do too much at once due to overheat. It might sound complicated but its actually pretty intuitive. That is until you get into the very last second of projected future. You really can't see further ahead in the timeline than this so its possible to set actions that cause overheat into your next turn without really knowing it'll happen. Also sometimes you'll be able to set a RUN action several turns into the future, but sometimes it hiccups if its too close to that exact 5 second mark. Also some things like missiles don't track very well in this system. You'll launch them and then maybe watch them fly around in the sky for a couple turns before actually hitting their target. The unique time manipulation gameplay mechanic of Phantom Brigade carries its shortcomings but you gotta like it. What this game misses out on in terms of story or maybe graphical charm it gets in return in novelty for it's 5 second planning playstyle. I'd recommend this one for fans of tactical strategy games who are looking for a new and unique spin on the genre. Overall I did end up enjoying my experience and feel like I could play around in this one even more to try out different build setups however the flaws were pretty noticeable. Phantom Brigade is kind of like getting a pair of shoes that are kinda boring looking but super comfortable to wear. Except sometimes the left shoe comes untied when your walking. The laces coming untied is annoying when it happens, theres more fashionable shoes in your closet but dang this pair just feels so good when you wear'em. full review available on video here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osq94GLMNwU

Yeah I just can't. Going to DNF this one. Life is short. I've had this game for a long while but every time I try it again I just get tired of it faster. I loved games like Battletech and XCom but this is worse than any of those in every way. There doesn't appear to be any story or fun gameplay or any reason to be there. You basically just do small little generic missions over and over in small little areas that are basically all the same. Feels like randomly generated garbage. It gets boring toward the end of the tutorial then does not get better. It gets more convoluted and uninteresting, and that's about it. Not my cup of tea.

Holy crap, talk about an upgrade, I refunded this game AGES ago (with a very heavy heart), because the tutorial didn't connect me to the world or the story, nor was it very good. BUT NOW EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT AND VERY - VERY NICE. Buy this game if you like mechs. Buy it if you like OVERPOWERED LASER BEAMS. Buy it if you love throwing helpful NPCs into harms way to stomp a convoy to death because all they have is a sniper rifle and the supply trucks are too close. Buy it if you like getting parts and being fiddly with your team load out. Buy it. It's currently on sale for $12, just BUY.

I question the redesign choice to remove the world map and replace it with what is basically a glorified level select screen, I really do. the game went from feeling epic and expansive to tiny and bland. Why the downgrade to the games scale, feel, and personality? I ended up uninstalling this game awhile back to make room for something else I wanted to play, then forgot about it till recently. This is really not what I wanted to come back to.