Hah, this was what got me off the demo! :D I was doing the last mission and had to dash so quickly quit out. When I returned… ‘Oh, I forgot it doesn’t save mid-mission.’ It’s definitely a bummer but something I can probably work around.
And that’s great to see.
Hopefully if it’s selling well in a year we can have a pretty decent game with save mid-mission, pilot progression, nemesis system and all the things that were in the roadmap!
I played a few minutes and handled the first few missions easily, acing them, but… still have this foreboding feeling i have no idea how to play this game. Not really lol
This is me, as well, but I’m not sure why it’s an issue. You and I have both played our share of Combat Mission, right? Isn’t this that, but with an interface more specific to the continuous time gameplay? And I don’t remember having to struggle with Frozen Synapse. So why am I having a hard time wrapping my head around the positioning of units and the time scrubber with the relatively intuitive video-editing interface? It seems like it should be simple enough, and I probably didn’t give it enough time, but after a couple of missions, I was still having trouble doing basic things like “taking cover”, “returning fire”, and “killing the other guys”.
I wonder if it was partly the tedium? I presume there’s an easier way to slap in multiple attack orders, but I didn’t discover it, and even then, I’m not sure there was anything here that I wasn’t already getting with, say, Phoenix Point or even old-school X-com. If anything, this just made me wonder how well the original Combat Mission holds up.
But, yeah, my reaction was similar to @TheWombat. It seemed pretty exciting at first, but after a couple of missions, it just felt like the continuous time was an obstacle rather than a helpful tool.
Great take on it, Tom. I’ve played other WEGO things, like you note, but something here didn’t click for me. Again, I’m not complaining about the game, which has a lot of cool stuff and is something I hope does well for the developers. Just something about it that I can’t get my head around.
Not having played but only having watched trailers, the idea of using a video editor-like timeline seems a bad idea, that looks too fiddly. Then again I think the issue is the main idea of the game: the concept seeing what the enemy will do and planning around that, and firing at the enemies in the specific points in the timeline. Because that’s what it’s making you rewind and ff and drag orders in the timeline.
In Combat MIssion and Frozen Synapse, the other We Go games I also played, it was mostly about moving to desired positions, and firing at known targets, or maybe defining aiming areas / high priority fire. So you just clicked on the map for the move and fire orders, like any normal game, you didn’t interact with a timeline. What these games had, was an autonomous AI: if your units would see a new enemy during the ‘execution phase’, they would naturally engage on their own. It’s a different paradigm here.
Great point, @TurinTur. I suspect that accounts for a lot of why I feel so hapless trying to learn Phantom Brigade. No one’s going to shoot unless I tell them to.
Fair point. Same concept as the other games I’ve played, but a very different approach indeed.
And it may well be a really good paradigm, too, just one I can’t grok.
Well, I’m glad I’m not the only one. I don’t have the energy this week to take on ‘learning’ a new system. Next week Ill give it another shot, it’s too heavy to focus and absorb a new unintuitive UI with so much going on in my life at the moment.
In the case of this game I suspect, it will be worth the price of admission, but being honest here… the entry cost is not a small thing. I can see a lot of people just moving on.
From my experience with the demo (I’m too busy with Returnal at present to jump into Phantom Brigade!), Phantom Brigade reminds me more of Frozen Cortex: it’s about windows of opportunity and physically stopping and blocking enemies. So you might know where every unit is going, who they’re shooting at and when, but it’s your job to find windows of movement, windows of cover, windows to attack, windows to block gunfire, even windows to thread shots through your own units. Even the overheating mechanic creates windows. Shoot too often and you’ll hobble your next turn, but… what if you’re able to take down that enemy before the 5 seconds is up? That’s worth it, right?
In Frozen Synapse, aside from the shield units, there was no body blocking with standard units and in Frozen Cortex unit defence was a key part in tackling others, just like mech weight is in Phantom Brigade.
I think another big difference is that Cortex and Synapse were all about you predicting what your enemy would do and intercepting it (particularly in ‘dark’ games). Of course, if you messed up and misread something, that would often bite. 5 seconds of nail-biting tension and terror. Phantom Brigade you know what every unit is going to do which doesn’t sound as interesting but hey, Invisible Inc. and Into The Breach both do that kind of thing and they’re fantastic. This changed my approach from factoring in and attempting to counter as many potential outcomes as possible (like in Phoenix Point, X-COM, Frozen Synapse and indeed Frozen Cortex) to here’s what’s going to happen, can you turn this around (like in Into The Breach)?
I think it’s a really interesting twist to play something that resembles your X-COM-likes but with the implications of simultaneous ‘WeGo’ play, the physicality and timeline fine-tuning of Frozen Cortex, and the tactical puzzle-y goodness of Into The Breach. I’m looking forward to playing it properly and seeing how it holds up!
Yes, I find it intriguing as well. I’m too dumb to figure it out though.
That’s very helpful, @geggis! I don’t know why the total omniscience of Into the Breach didn’t occur to me as the model, but I wonder if that’s what it takes for this to click? Thusly armed, I might have to jump back in at some point and give it another shot.
I played the demo and immediately ‘got’ the whole time thing…then played again later that day and my ‘got’ was gone. Then tried again even later and sorta ‘got’ it again. No idea why it clicked but then didn’t. I did enjoy my time and will make this a purchase sometime when I have time to play it again.
My biggest complaint about the game so far is that so much of the UI uses click and hold to do things in menus without ever communicating that.
I’m finding the combat super interesting. Having perfect knowledge of the enemy intent does make it very different from my touchstone for this wego stuff, Robosport. That was a game I played a ton of on a friend’s Macintosh as kids.
Managing heat and optimal ranges makes sense to me, but I still fall into traps of making my units collide on accident occasionally. Using melee weapons is confusing, though, but having a shield guy run into an enemy seems to work.
I’m curious to see where mech building goes. Early on it all seems very samey, but I saw a YouTube thumbnail that suggested to me more variety later on.
I’ve been playing this game the last few days and I’ve gotten through the tutorial province and am now free to wander. I can see why some people don’t like the UI, but I got comfortable with it pretty quick. I also love big stompy mech action with missiles and lasers and explosions so this game seems tailor made for me. My only issue is that I appear to suck at this game. I can win missions but I’ve always got wounded pilots and swiss-cheese mechs limping home with missing limbs/weapons.
Is this game just tough and I should power through because it’s supposed to be this grueling or do I have a lack-of-skills problem? I’m not sure if this level of attrition of my squad is intended. I’m thinking about re-starting the game with all the difficulty knobs dialed as far down as I can go, but I also don’t want to get halfway into a campaign and discover that I’ve made it so easy it’s boring.
On Three Moves Ahead they were thinking it was fairly forgiving on normal difficulty. I think one was playing on normal and they thought it was pretty chill, one bumped it up 1 and didn’t find it too hard and the 3rd had it on max and found it challenging but she was persevering. I don’t have it yet so I don’t have any first hand experience. I’m pretty sure I’ll get it at some point.
The difficulty is definitely not a smooth gradient in my experience. It was tough in the beginning, but as my campaign went on it could end up where a lot of encounters were fairly trivial. But then there are still situations where maps with reinforcement showing up could devastate my team.
Thanks for the responses @robc04 and @Brad_Grenz !
After some more beating my head against save-reload I’ve learned the following.
The people behind Phantom Brigade will definitely give a player enough rope to hang themselves with. Once out of the tutorial and going into free-wander mode it’s quite possible to encounter fights that are waaaaay too hard. Pay attention to the projected difficulty and understand that not all fights are winnable, but almost all of them are avoidable.
Coming out of tutorial the starting mechs are garbage. Luckily things improve quickly if one can struggle through a few fights. Salvaging L3/L4 equipment from the first few fights will rapidly upgrade mechs.
This game rewards a weird style of defensive play. One can’t turtle up or hide in a map corner, that usually ends badly. Instead the right approach is to mix it up with the enemies but watch the forecast enemy moves first and primarily figure out how to dodge around so that the enemy shots all happen when your mechs are in cover/dashing/hunkered behind a shield/out of optimal range/etc. Once an approach to avoid most of the damage is plotted, return fire orders can be sprinkled in around the key movements. After I figured out to plan defense first, offense second, the game got a lot easier.
Missile launchers that feature arcing fire and guidance are stupidly good. Unlike most weapons they can be fired at almost any range, without losing accuracy for firing on the move. I tend to have 2-3 mechs with missile launchers and they just pick off an enemy per turn with concentrated fire. Only drawback is that this concentrated fire approach tends to blow up mechs completely which reduces salvage opportunities. But hey, I don’t need as much salvage if I’m not salvaging my own blown-off limbs after battle so it’s still a win.
Melee weapons are tricky as hell, but stupidly good. I got a Plasma Axe for raiding some weapon cache and so far it has one-shotted every mech it’s connected with. And it’s only killing pilots while leaving mechs intact for salvage. It’s really finicky to set up an attack, but worth it.
Don’t overheat. I had several fights where I was losing mechs that didn’t seem to be taking much enemy fire. Then I realized all the damage was self-inflicted because I wasn’t paying attention to the little thermometer graphic next to the timeline when planning out shots. Unless things are dire, don’t fire or dash until a point on the timeline where the heat meter is 95% empty (or better).
Don’t collide with your own mechs or shoot your own mechs in the back. It’s a lot easier than you think. Once you give orders the pilots will faithfully execute them even if you ram two mechs together because you weren’t paying attention to who would be where/when.
Heavy mechs seem pointless. Heavy arms/legs/torsos have superior hit points but they give the mech much worse speed and cooldown. The latter is a killer as it means firing weapons a lot less often which makes fights drag on because enemies aren’t going down. I’m still pretty early in the game so maybe there will be some better heavy options later but right now I’d be running all light parts if I could get my hands on them. I can’t, so I’m running a mix of medium/light parts. If I need a mech to be tougher I just give it a big shield.
I’ve played dozens of hours at this point and I still can’t figure out how to get melee attacks to connect reliably…
Later in the game squishy mechs will go down so fast you’ll have to change things up, but by then you should have decent reactor and subsystem options to mitigate the mobility compromises.