A Real-Time with Pause Genre Mashup Mini-Mecha Turn-Based Tactics game, Phantom Brigade follows the story of the eponymous Phantom Brigade, a special operations unit turned freedom fighters as they seek to reclaim the Homeland from The Empire after a sudden invasion. Faced with overwhelming odds, the Brigade has one advantage on its side; a prototype system that grants every unit five seconds of Combat Clairvoyance. With it, they might just stand a chance - if they can fight their way to the Capital.
How do you Genre Mashup Real-Time with Pause and Turn-Based Tactics? Simple; each turn consists of five seconds of real-time combat, interspersed with pauses to use the planning system. During this paused time, the player is able to 'scrub' back and forth across the next five seconds to observe every planned enemy action - and plan their own actions accordingly. Sounds like it might make things too easy? Well, you're up against an entire army for starters...
It entered Epic Early Access on November 16, 2020 and had its full release on February 28th, 2023.
According to our predictive prototype, the game will provide examples of:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: The whole thing feels a bit like this; most everything is identifiably mundane if slightly advanced looking, but you also have fantastical-but-maybe-plausible elements like the Mini-Mecha and long-range energy weapons.
- Ace Custom: Each of your own units will eventually end up as an Ace Custom in order to suit the pilot's skills, based on whatever equipment you can steal, salvage, or trade for.
- All Up to You: Subverted. The titular Brigade is part of a much larger war effort to free the Homeland, requiring Home Guard troops to secure liberated areas. As the vanguard of said operation, however, it more often than not acts as the decisive factor.
- Alternate History: The divergence happens roughly around the end of the Cretaceous, in which the dinosaurs weren't wiped out by a single impact, but multiple. While humanity still emerges down the line and develops along similar lines to our history, the presence of readily available rare-earth metals made possible by said impacts is what heavily motivates The Empire's invasion in the first place.
- Arbitrary Weapon Range: Largely averted; weapons can be fired at a target no matter the range, but will deal less damage if the target is too close or too far away, with the effectiveness indicated next to the reticle/selector. Shotguns and machineguns suffer from this fairly hard due to shots spreading out, but it's also used to enforce Competitive Balance where sniper rifles deal less damage to targets that are too close.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Heavy Mechs are big, beefy with more integrity than light and medium mechs. But their speed takes a giant nose dive due to their colossal mass, and their heat capacity is also lowered meaning they can't fire weapons as often. As the game favors a lot proper positioning to get the best of your enemy who generally field better mechs and weapons, heavy mechs tend to fair far less well. Their integrity is also not that much higher than medium mechs, so they don't perform that well as tanks. There's some niche use like making them ram into enemies as collision effects are dependent on weight, but generally medium mechs perform better.
- Back Stab: Whilst units don't take more direct/physical damage when attacked from behind, they do take more concussion damage; this is damage to the pilot, and if it maxes out then they're knocked unconscious for the remainder of combat. This is the best way to get salvage, as mechs often don't have to be badly damaged for the pilot to be knocked out.
- Base on Wheels: Part of why the Brigade is able to fight as they do is their special Base On Wheels. Adapted from a mining mech transport and outfitted with 'cloaking tech', it serves as your mobile base of operations through the campaign. It won't stop enemy patrols from spotting you if you get too close to them, but it's enough to avoid full retaliation.
- BFS: The largest melee weapons are huge, though they're not quite to absurd proportions.
- Bottomless Magazines: In full effect; units never need to stop and reload their weapons, no matter how many shots they fire (and an HMG-equipped unit could easily burn hundreds of rounds in a single encounter with the right setup). Instead you have to manage Overheating.
- Car Fu: The AI tank drivers are reckless to the extreme, and will often attempt to ram or just drive through your units. Unfortunately for them, all but the lightest mechs will handily beat tanks in a collision.
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Player projectiles/effects are blue, enemy projectiles/effects are orange. Enemy units are also typically white or black, with red highlights; players are free to coordinate their units however they like.
- Combat Clairvoyance: Exactly five seconds of it. As you can see the AI's every action, much of the gameplay stems from how you react and mitigate those actions; timing your attacks to not be countered by their shields, raising your shield or maneuvering behind cover to counter their attacks, and so on.
- Crosshair Aware: Part of the above Combat Clairvoyance is the ability to see when enemies are making attacks, and exactly what their effective range is, with a big cone. This is vital for minimizing the damage your units will take, either by ensuring they're outside that effective range, have their shield up if they have one, or behind cover.
- Culture Chop Suey: The Homeland comes across as an amalgamation of various Scandinavian and Baltic cultures. Its highly-organized Home Guard and the citizenry's stubborn defiance, however, calls to mind Poland during the Second World War.
- Day of the Jackboot: The Empire's rule over the Homeland is shown to be oppressive and overbearing, its propaganda insisting that its draconian measures are only temporary and that the people will welcome their new way of life. In-game, this also translates into occupied settlements being dilapidated landscapes strewn with propaganda and imposing military structures.
- Difficult, but Awesome: Flak Cannons and the Firestarter model Heavy Pistols are fairly hard to use, as they fire a small number of explosive projectiles per Attack. Whilst they hit very hard per shot and in a decent area-of-effect (allowing them to damage multiple parts or even units with a single shot) friendly fire and self damage alike are serious risks, and it's entirely possible for all shots to miss.
- Dual Wielding: You can absolutely arm your mechs with paired handguns or SMGs, though sadly you can't fire them both simultaneously right now. You can also go Sword and Gun, backing up melee weapons with sidearms.
- Early Game Hell: While the campaign does ease you in on what to expect, you're nonetheless forced to make do with only meager resources and a handful of mechs at the start, against enemies who can take your forces out with ease if one's careless.
- Ejection Seat: Every mech comes with one as standard, as it also serves as the cockpit. Forcing enemies to eject, usually by destroying their arms/weapons, is one of the various ways to get salvage. Vehicles can simply Surrender instead, though this is rare.
- Elite Army: Downplayed. The Brigade is explicitly described as a spec-ops unit that's received substantial training and support since the invasion, and that is before they even return to the Homeland. Despite being just a comparatively small contingent, it could nonetheless hold its own against much larger opponents.
- Elite Mooks: The Empire has several separate 'divisions', the main ones being the Reserves, Army, Experimental, and Spec Ops. Spec Ops naturally serve as the Elite Mooks of the forces and are typically the best-equipped and most dangerous of the lot, and crop up more as you get into higher-level territories.
- Equipment-Based Progression: Whilst pilots will have their own skill and progression system at some point in the future, for now all of your progression is based off equipment levels and rarity. The level acts as a multiplier or modifier for the base statistics (so a Level 10 torso has noticeably more Integrity than a Level 1 torso) whilst rarity adds additional slots for subsystems and inherent modifiers.
- Fictional Earth: Specifically one in which the dinosaurs weren't wiped out by a single massive impact so much as a series of them. These impactors have left a ring of debris in orbit, and the impact sites themselves contain valuable rare-earth metals - which is why The Empire invaded.
- Fog of War: On top of undetected enemy units, this also manifests in how your Combat Clairvoyance can still work past five seconds, at the cost of significant uncertainty.
- Hand Cannon: Heavy pistols, but particularly the Blast and Firestarter models; the Blasts are shotgun pistols, and the Firestarters fire large explosive rounds.
- Hot Blade: Swords leave magnificent orange trails during their arcs, making them very easy to see whilst also giving them the impression of being heated in some way.
- Invisibility Cloak: The Empire being unable to pin down the Brigade's crawler is handwaved away as being due to "cloaking tech". It's not flawless, as patrols will be able to spot and pursue you if you get too close to them.
- Jump Jet Pack: After you get out of the lowest tiers, it's exceedingly rare (if not impossible) to find a torso unit that doesn't have Thrusters. Whilst they don't permit true flight, they do permit rocket-based boosting. This generates heat, but it's generally faster than running and can help you get to places you otherwise couldn't, such as on top of buildings.
- Know When to Fold 'Em: Knowing when to retreat from a combat zone, whether or not you succeed in your objectives, can be just as important as fighting the enemy.
- La Résistance: In addition to the Brigade itself, there's the Government in Exile-backed Home Guard, comprised of guerilla fighters and what's left of the Homeland's military.
- Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Giant metal shields make up one of the left-arm slot options, and come in both heavy and light variants suited for assault units or for protecting faster skirmisher units respectively. They can absorb a fairly hefty amount of punishment.
- Mecha-Mooks: Naturally. Aside from the tanks, anyway.
- Mighty Glacier: Any mech made with lots of Heavy parts will tend to be this, capable of winning collisions against any other weight class, though with the right parts it might be possible to make a Lightning Bruiser out of them instead.
- Mini-Mecha: You can build, maintain, and customize half a dozen in your Mobile Base, and deploy up to four into each combat encounter. Each is about two to three floors tall. Their components can be customized fairly extensively too.
- More Dakka: Most weapons fire maybe one or two dozen projectiles per attack cycle at most. Machineguns can fire up to fifty. They make a suitably fitting brrrrrt sort of sound when doing so. Expect any target in their effective range to be rapidly shredded.
- No Name Given: The Homeland is only ever referred to as such. Likewise, The Empire's actual name is never explicitly stated.
- Norse by Norsewest: All the county and location names (apart from military bases) give a very Scandinavian/Baltic feel to the Homeland.
- Our Weapons Will Be Boxy in the Future: A lot of the heavier weapons are very boxy, particularly the heavier shotguns, machineguns, and sniper rifles.
- Overheating: Firing weapons and using thrusters will generate heat; if heat exceeds the unit's capacity it'll take a percentage amount of damage from their total health per second until it cools below threshold. Units that take too much heat damage may auto-eject, and even if they don't that damage will need to be repaired later. This can be offset by installing Capacitors (which increase the overheat threshold) and Heatsinks (which cause units to cool faster).
- Punched Across the Room: Not quite punched, but the heaviest melee weapons are all but guaranteed to stagger and knock down victims even without leg breaks, potentially sending them crashing through buildings or tumbling to the ground. Lighter blades can be used for consecutive strikes or careful hit and run attacks, but sometimes interrupting an enemy's entire action is a more effective tactic.
- Ragdoll Physics: Full ragdoll physics kick in when mechs lose control, which is usually caused by the pilot being knocked out or ejecting, or by collisions. Mechs and tanks can go sliding around the battlefield if rammed with a dash action, pinballing off one another or crashing through entire buildings.
- Randomly Generated Loot: Most equipment uses a system of base stats modified by level and rarity. There are no 'random drops' from mechs however; what you see is what you can salvage, and if you destroy an enemy mech's arm then you can't salvage that arm after the battle. But on the other hand if you knock the pilot out without damaging their mech too badly, you can take the entire thing more or less intact. Vehicles that are disabled rather than destroyed (due to surrender or crew KO) will sometimes give random subsystems as salvage, but never reward mech parts or weapons. Obviously any parts you find lying around in warehouses and caches, or loot from convoys, can be completely random.
- Regenerating Shield, Static Health: Parts can have Integrity (Health, static), and Barrier (Shield, regenerating). Typically parts that have Barrier have significantly lower Integrity and often lower total effective health compared to an all-Integrity component, but with the added bonus of regenerating if the unit goes undamaged for a certain amount of time.
- Shield Bash: Whilst you can't explicitly shield bash right now, you can still order a unit to walk into the path of another with their shield up. Doing so will cause the shield to take the brunt of the impact, and the lighter of the two units will be staggered or even knocked down. This gives you a very effective means of interrupting enemy actions if you use a heavy unit, as the Crashing 'action' immediately overrides whatever they were doing.
- Shield-Bearing Mook: Naturally many enemy units will have shields as well. Whilst it makes sense for the shotgunners and machinegunners, any long-range unit with a shield is exceedingly vulnerable to close-range harassment... which is where melee units come in.
- Short-Range Shotgun: Shotguns have the shortest range of all weapons, but do devastating amounts of damage within their bracket, be they pocket-sized shotgun pistols, slow-firing pump shotguns, or rapid-fire semi-automatics that spray out multiple waves of shot.
- Slave to PR: Downplayed. Being the vanguard in the Homeland's liberation, all eyes from the Government in Exile to the Home Army and average civilian are on the Brigade. While your countrymen are generally forgiving given the circumstances, it's still important to keep morale up through decisive battles and careful maneuvering.
- Socketed Equipment: Higher-level, higher-rarity components can come with swappable components such as heatsinks, capacitors, sensors, and hydraulics, which all improve the mech's performance in various ways. Thrusters can also be removed, and come in various models with different purposes. At higher levels, even the power cores can be switched out.
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Spiritual Successor: Those familiar with the Front Mission series will have a hard time not seeing a few parallels between the two. The combat in cutscenes from the more recent entries are stated to have been an explicit inspiration for the gameplay. - Standard FPS Guns: As far as guns go currently there's pistols, sub machine guns, shotguns, assault rifles, marksman/sniper rifles, machine guns, and flak cannons, each with their own perks and drawbacks. There are also swords for melee weapons.
- Sticks to the Back: Some stowed weapons will visibly stick to the mech's back or hover next to their thigh.
- Suicidal Overconfidence: An enemy unit can be the last one on the field, surrounded by four mechs in good condition, with its own legs and one arm destroyed... and they'll still stand and fight rather than eject.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: No matter how well the Brigade performs or how bold its exploits are, it's still just one relatively small unit whose gains could easily be lost if The Empire sends enough reinforcements. As such, it has to work in tandem with the much larger Home Guard if it hopes to make those victories meaningful.
- Tanks for Nothing: The Empire fields both Abram-esque battle tanks and Gepard-esque AA tanks. Naturally, they are hideously outclassed by the Mini-Mecha - though they don't quite die in a single hit from most weapons, they're easily knocked out if hit from the flank, and any such hit is liable to trash their treads and immobilize them even if it doesn't KO or destroy them. Their weapons are some of the weakest as well, though the AA tanks can inflict a surprising amount of damage as they're essentially just mech machineguns on treads.
- Variable Mix: Most notable on the overworld view, where music intensity changes based on time of day and whether you're in an occupied or liberated province; it tends to be more subdued and ominous at night in occupied territories, but much more upbeat and inspiring in liberated provinces during the day.
- Video Game Caring Potential: You'll often come across enemy deserters, stranded civilians, and people in need during your fight to save the Homeland. Deserters can be held as prisoners, ignored, or simply released, whilst civilians can be assisted (usually at the cost of time and supplies) or ignored (at the cost of fatigue or hope instead). Doing good deeds costs time and resources but can often lead to better rewards later such as being tipped off to the location of supply caches, so unless you have other pressing matters to attend to like an enemy siege or a patrol chasing you, it's often a good idea to stop and help people.
