Intro
I think to try and change up these reviews a little bit, I want to start these reviews by giving as much nitty gritty statistics as I can about my experience with the game I review. Just to give you, the reader, some basis for the perspective I have about the game. As well as not obfuscating my game experience like most reviews from game’s media. So to the numbers!
Total Playtime: 35 hours
*Total Sessions: 18
Longest Session: 5 hrs 54 mins
First Session: Sun Jun 28 09:34:42 AM 2026
Last Session: Sat Jul 11 08:37:37 PM 2026
These statistics are collected with a piece of software I made, all it does is track when an executable starts and ends, then logs it. I may write a post about it later. I’ve been using it since May of this year, and while I think it’s already pretty good. I want to go back and redo it.
Phantom Brigade’s Steam Description:
*Phantom Brigade 2.0 is a cinematic, tactical mech strategy game with a revolutionary timeline-based command system. See the future, predict enemy actions, and plot your counterattack on the timeline! Recruit and level up your squad of rebels to retake war-torn Fyrland from the Kaskad occupation.
* A session is every time I boot up the game.
Gameplay
Where I’d add to the Steam description is that the game is essentially a Turn-based strategy game with RPG elements. You are the commander of a rebel cell, where you command mech pilots on missions to help retake your homeland from the invaders. The main advantage you have over your enemies is a machine that allows you to predict every action over the course of 5 seconds. The way a turn works is that you are able to see all enemy actions over the next 5 seconds, and you can plan your mech’s actions over the course of those same 5 seconds. Each action takes up a certain amount of time, things like moving to a new location, shooting, venting heat from your mech, etc. Then you end your turn and both sides execute their actions simultaneously.
You then keep taking turns, until you win and depending on the win condition for the mission there’s many different ways you can accomplish that goal. After the mission you can salvage enemy mechs for parts, which you can then use to replace parts on your own mechs. Or scrap them in order to accrue resources necessary to make your own mech pieces. This then leads into the RPG/X-COM aspects of the game. Upgrading your base, RNG characters, in-depth customization, equipment, skill trees, classes, overworld/metagame. The influences are very obvious and for the most part, pretty well done.
The most unique aspect of this game is the way it’s turns work so that’s as good a place as any to start. When I first played the demo for Phantom Brigade, this idea of real time turns, combined with a planning phase, I thought was incredibly interesting. And I believed it would really draw in a lot of people because it’s a pretty cool concept that would appeal to the X-COM/TBS crowd. And After playing a whole campaign, I think they did a fantastic job nailing down that aspect to the gameplay, I worried that It might have gotten repetitive planning the same actions or that It would’ve lacked the necessary depth in order for the game to succeed. But they did a masterful job of having you plan actions that feel meaningful every single turn, by having different mechanics that prevent you from taking too many actions all at once. Or to prevent you from abusing the system. For instance, you can take as many shooting actions as you want but using guns and some other actions build up heat, if you build up too much heat then you’ll overheat and get a fire DOT effect. Which means you can’t keep shooting infinitely or you’ll make yourself vulnerable to enemy attacks. It’s a very good trade-off that forces you to consider your actions and actually plan, for not just this turn, but the next turn as well. You might want to bleed off a lot of heat to use a high heat or high damage weapon or you might want to use your thrusters to dash out of stick situation. There are ways to mitigate heat, your pilots can unlocks skills lower the amount of heat they build up and there are mech parts and modifiers you can apply onto yourself that increases the amount of heat needed to cause your mech to overheat or how much heat is dissipated every second. There are also weapons in the game that can inflict fire damage that increases yours or enemies heat and can quickly cause overheating. The thing I like most about this system is that these constraints feel natural, it’s not that there is some artificial action limit, it’s a risk-reward system that’s then tied in with the damage types of weapons. While you would think that limits players or frustrate them, because of it’s natural integration with these other systems it actually gives players more options. I certainly made mechs that were these lumbering tanks that could sustain a ton of heat damage, and perform a ton of shooting actions with low heat weapons. Or equipped mechs with fire weapons causing enemies to overheat and destroy themselves by taking actions, or forcing them to do nothing to prevent further overheating damage. Or to take a vent action this turn to vent heat prematurely so you can take a shooting action with a high heat laser weapon next turn.
My only critique with this system is that I wish there were some abilities that pilots could get to reduce the action times of certain weapons. Or that there were modifiers you could put onto weapons to have a longer action action time, or more heat in exchange for dealing more damage, or adding status effects onto your shooting actions. As in dealing fire damage with a normally non-fire damage projectile weapon in exchange for building up more heat than fire based weapons. But this less has to do with the 5 second turn planner system and more with the RPG systems in the game. Overall, I think this system is very well designed and the devs should be proud of it, it’s a fun game and most of that fun comes from interacting with this system in particular.
Now to those aforementioned RPG systems, I think these systems are some of the weaker, if not weakest aspects of the game. We’ll start with the stuff that people will interact with the most over the course of the game and that’s mech customization. The way the system functions currently is that when you make a new mech, you must first build a mech frame which is a combination of a 2 resources common parts and a mech core. You gain mech cores and common parts from completing missions with those rewards. Or you can gain common parts by salvaging common mech parts, simple stuff. Once you build a mech frame you can then put on mech parts from your inventory onto the frame. In order to pilot a mech it must have; a head, left arm, right arm, body, legs, and a reactor. You can also put on a weapon onto both the left and right arms or use a weapon that needs both, also you can get a backpack. Mech parts are broken down into rarities from common to epic. When you salvage parts after a mission, the rarities of the parts is derived from the difficulty level of the mission and the modifiers for the current region you’re in. In other words, the more difficult an area you’re in and the more challenging the mission the better loot you get. As you progress through a campaign you’ll find better mech parts that offer a more diverse type of playstyle with a mech. Whether that be lighter parts for faster mechs that are a lot more susceptible to be destroyed, more bulky mechs that are a lot slower but can take a lot more punishment. More standard parts that are good all around, but not particularly adept in anything. What differentiates part rarities is depending on their rarity, they will get perks that will boost their stats. These perks are RNG and range from giving you a larger heat buffer to boosting the amount of shields that particular part has.. Because yes, parts can be destroyed, however you can’t really target parts, like say in a Fallout VATS kind of way. Higher rarity parts will also give you more slots to put on components, these components allow you to boost a parts stats, similar to how perks work. The key when making a mech is to make sure that you’re mech parts all kind of work together, you have to have a high energy reactor in order to use more powerful weapons, or more powerful thrusters otherwise you simply can’t really use without taking a ton of damage. But simultaneously you may want a lower energy core so that you can move faster and be more lean on your weaponry. The goal in building a mech is efficiency, and while I think the system as it is fine. I have a lot of issues with it.
First and foremost, my main issue with this system is the overall lack of options, particularly with the weapons. Each weapon type has 3 different sub-types, for example there’s a burst assault rifle, there’s a more normal lower range assault rifle, and there’s a more accurate long range assault rifle that has a lower number of projectiles. But that’s really it, the rarities may add more damage or affect the amount of heat it generates but the issue is, that’s it. Besides the perks that slightly affect the stats of the weapon, every single epic rarity burst assault rifle always feels the exact same, even when you add some components onto it. I understand the intention is to be more X-Com like but I think if you make the intention to add a rarity and perk system onto these mech parts, than you need to add a lot more RNG to the parts. It has to feel more diablo ARPG like, rather than X-Com like, or else get rid of the rarities, add more items/components, and prioritize pilot skills instead. This current system is just very infuriating I think either way could work but this current iteration feels like a bastardization of both systems that just doesn’t function as intended. It also massively constrains your mech builds as well, as there isn’t that many different kinds of armor pieces or reactors for you to have a multitude of different playstyles. Unlike the 5 second action planner this system feels like an artificial constraint on the player, because it’s an under-developed, under-designed system that needs a lot of work, or an entire redo from the ground up in order to be the kind of game it wants to be. My personal recommendation for this game is to pick a direction for this system, whether that’s less mech parts and more RNG, or no RNG and more mech parts and more components to modify those parts. Then stick to the story and design the parts to be highly customizable by the RNG system, or to be more plain but allowing you to customize each part tuning them with components that you build or unlock via research or campaign progress which is more X-Com like.
Piggybacking off of that leads me to the Pilot’s, now this system I’m a little bit more mixed on, because I don’t necessarily think that it needs a complete overhaul. Pilots operate much like X-Com Operatives, meaning you recruit pilots as fresh recruits or you can recruit pilots that have a class and a certain level already but you have to spend a lot of resources to gain them. When a fresh recruit levels up they are automatically assigned a random class by the game. Each class has abilities and passives unique to that class that enhance their mechs stats in one way or another. In Phantom Brigade there are 4 classes; Sharpshooter, Interceptor, Engineer, Defender. Every time a pilot levels up they either select 1 passive ability given a few different options, or they get a unique class specific ability. Once you reach the highest level, you can prestige your pilot, selecting a passive ability for them to keep and then they will reset to level 1 gain some additional buffs and lose all other abilities and passives. You can prestige with a character 3 times and then you will have reached the max level possible for a character. You can also gain passive abilities from being knocked unconscious via concussive damage to your mech, or their mech being destroyed if they are still inside. Usually, these are majorly negative debuffs, but they also offer some tradeoff as well, buffing you massively in one area and debuffing you massively in another. If your character is knocked unconscious 3 times the fourth time they are permanently dead.
What I like about the class system is the progression, I like the prestieging system and how that only applies to passives and then how you can also accrue buffs and debuffs from your character being knocked out in combat as well. Just like in X-Com it leads to developing these sort of narratives for your characters, having progression not just be about their successes, but also their failures. It gives these characters their own sort of personality and makes the system feel a lot more reactive.
What I don’t like is that the active and passive ability pools are rather limited, much like with the armor pieces. So it rather constrains the amount of builds you can have for your different classes. I would’ve also like to have seen a passive for taking out certain types of enemies. Like if your mech had killed a ton of tanks one mission, they might gain a natural buff to destroying tanks and other small vehicles. Not an insane buff but a small one to reinforce the transactional nature of these X-Com like games.
I also wish there were more enemy types in this game. There’s a few classes of enemies, the small vehicles: tanks, missile launchers, transport vehicles, then there’s the mechs and finally bosses. The bosses are majorly all the same with one notable exception which I won’t spoil as it is the game’s “Final Boss.” But I would’ve like to have seen a few more enemy types, for instance the game’s boss battles consist of fighting a giant behemoth spider bot. These spider bots are really cool because they are made up of hardpoints that have turrets mounted on them, different bosses have different kind of turrets. I think what you could’ve done is make a smaller version of the behemoth enemy with only a few hardpoints, and they would be these sort of mini boss characters. That you have to dedicate fire to, in order to destroy them. The game is pretty good in it’s diversity of enemy types but in the latter half, the game only gets more difficult by throwing a ton of enemies at you, which for some missions is fine, but I’d prefer keeping the enemy count relatively steady throughout the experience and making the enemies you’re dealing with steadily more difficult or annoying to deal with. But I’d also like to see a little bit more of the unpredictable enemies, enemies that you really can’t see what they’re doing during the planning phase, having a boss that you can’t see their actions or movements until you destroy some kind of support unit or something like that. With the planning mechanic there’s a ton of things you could do here with enemies teleporting to new locations, going invisible, etc. But there’s not really any fulfillment or interesting twists enemy’s have to give you extra things to think about during the planning phase. It’s a bit of a missed opportunity, which is why I really want a second game that really expands on these core mechanics because I believe it could be incredibly good.
Conclusion
I think the highest praise I can give anything, is that it was so good that I wish there was more of it. However, I think this game straddles the line between not having enough to make me like it, and having good foundations that It makes me excited should another one of these games come out. I’m left with a wanting feeling after playing this but simultaneously the mechanics I think are too interesting not to experience and I think anybody who really enjoyed X-Com or X-Com 2, would really enjoy Phantom Brigade. Or if you’re like me and you love giant robots with guns, you will enjoy designing and coloring big robots and then watch them fight. Good Game.
P.S. It has been a bit since the last review, that’s because game’s I want to play are releasing like delicious batches of cookies. So there is a ton of shit to play and the writing and editing pipes have been a little clogged. I’ve got a Marvel’s Midnight Suns Review, a Blood of Dawnwalker Review all in the works and there is a ton of things to say about either game. Unfortunately, The Total War Warhammer 3 DLC came out and I’ve been sinking tons of hours into that. Ace Combat 8, the only game I’ve preordered in about 4 years comes out in 2 days and on the 8th Order of the Sinking Star a massive puzzle game I’ve been really looking forward to releases. So things are only getting more hectic, and no I’m not playing GTA 6 on launch, there’s too many other games I’m excited for and GTA 6 is a known known. I’m not complaining though, games are all good. I’m thinking of doing more editorial stuff that is just my thoughts about certain games or some development within the industry or my thoughts on current topics. So stay tuned.