I had been warned about the dangers of being outnumbered, and so a wave of gunfire hit. While I was advised by Ryan to go around the far side of the buildings to attack their side, I felt as though my mech with a massive shield could go up the middle for some dramatic heroic action. For the demo, I only had two mechs, while they had a handful of tanks and one mech as their leader. Cause And Effect Write LargeĮven in the middle of a convention, the combat was engaging and fun… even if I got my butt handed to me. For example, where you choose to fire becomes a cone of effect: There is no miss chance if you are able to anticipate where enemies are, but you still have to try and plan where to target to get maximum damage. Ryan kept coming back to the how he wanted to make the player feel powerful and in the action, becoming dramatically involved and feeling like they could control the situation. Then, once you finalize your decisions, all the units act at the same time. As you move back and forth along the timeline it will show you what your opponents are doing, and you can precisely program in the actions you want to take. Instead of having turns broken up into individual actions that happen one by one, you’re given a timeline that you can scroll along. Phantom Brigade is, to break it down simplistically, an evolution of typical tactics games like XCOM, made with the intent to become something that feels more intense and fluid. With that in mind, we got our hands on the keyboard to see exactly what he meant. He was passionate about the projects he had brought to PAX East, and one refrain kept coming up in our conversations with him: “I saw a genre I liked, but no one had done it quite this way before”. We had a chance to go hands on as we sat down with Ryan Clark, the founder of Brace Yourself Games and designer of Crypt of the Necrodancer. There’s also a chance you might be asking yourself: “Alright, seeing a few seconds into the future is a cool gimmick, but how does Phantom Brigade actually play?” It’s a really fun premise that makes you both feel completely badass and also very worried about how you are going to survive terrible odds. You might find yourself shooting at an enemy that isn’t there yet, or juking into an attack instead of away from it. While it’s spot-on most of the time, it can make mistakes, or your enemies may have a chance to react to what you’re doing. You might find yourself shooting at an enemy that isn’t there yet, or juking into an attack instead of away from it.įinally, your computer isn’t perfect. After you've keyed in your attacks, you get to watch the combat play out on the battlefield this of course can be painful when you've made a critical error.įinally, your computer isn’t perfect. Just responding to what’s happening at that moment isn’t good enough, you have to make sure you’re not putting yourself into an even worse situation.
Phantom Brigade is a turn-based game after all, and your mech will only show you your enemies’ next turn. Secondly, the system only sees a few seconds into the future. Knowing that they’re about to surround you and gun you down doesn’t help if you can’t do something about it.
First of all, even if you know what your enemies are going to do, there are still a lot of them. If that’s the case, you might ask yourself, how is it even possible to lose? Well, there are a few things working against you. The odds are stacked so high against you and your handful of mechs that it should be all but impossible, but you have an ace in the hole: a highly advanced computer that predicts where your enemies will be and what they will do, enabling you to make the perfect moves to counter them. The story of Phantom Brigade is that you are leading a vastly outnumbered and outgunned resistance force on a campaign to retake your homeland. Wait, Go Back To The Mechs Who Can See The Future
But, no, it turns out that they’re a tiny company from Vancouver with some big dreams. Between the impressive visuals and smooth gameplay of Phantom Brigade, and the fact that they had managed to get the rights to The Legend of Zelda in order to make Cadence of Hyrule (I suspect dark magic), I was figuring that Brace Yourself was a massive studio who’d somehow slipped under my radar. I’d seen the booth in passing, but hadn’t stopped in before our scheduled interview. That was the conversation that Wyatt and I had as we made our way to Brace Yourself Games’s booth at PAX East. Phantom Brigade has a team of about five developers working on it maybe about 15 people total? They’ve just been working on it for years.”
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