Phantom Brigade is an intriguing prototype, even if not quite ready for mass production.This is a visual guide to all PS4 Pro games enhanced over standard PS4. There’s the foundation for something great, but it will take a few expansions or an active modding scene to realize it. But once you attach all of the other elements to make a working game out of it, Phantom Brigade begins to creak and show its limitations. There’s a smart, forward-thinking system here that's elegant and impressive to watch when working as intended. The story’s skeletal nature mirrors the rest of the game, and echoes its own modular mech endoskeletons. You work alongside the Home Guard army to liberate one province at a time, while occasionally picking options in FTL-inspired multi-choice vignettes that often boil down to ‘sacrifice morale for speed or boost it by cheering up pilots or farmers’. You lead the Phantom Brigade, an independent partisan squad liberating The Homeland (a vaguely Nordic nation) from The Invaders, who have come from somewhere else and taken over all your stuff. Outside of a couple lines of dialogue during the tutorial, there’s no voice acting, no cutscenes and no plot arc, just the broadest strokes of a narrative with no juicy lore to chew on, or characters beyond the generic pilots that you name. Possibly the most threadbare part of the whole game is the story, because there’s effectively nothing here. Enemy stats get higher as you push further into the campaign map but, as you can salvage parts so easily, that’s how you gain strength as well. Even late into the campaign, the same handful of enemy types repeat (mechs using the same parts system and two types of tank) with no fast-movers, helicopters or strategic modifiers. It gives you so many pieces of equipment and gameplay systems that encourage you to overwhelm the enemy and exploit their unchanging weaknesses. Phantom Brigade works best when you feel like a plucky guerrilla fighter working against the odds. Win the battle early and the reinforcements will never show up. While there’s missions where you can technically win by getting in and securing an objective, it’s almost always quicker and easier to just wipe out the enemies as fast as possible, especially if reinforcement waves are due to arrive. There’s only a handful of map types (hills, villages, towns, industrial complexes and military bases) and aside from there being proximity-activated turrets in bases (solved by letting enemies come to you), they’re functionally identical in most regards. This wouldn’t be such an issue if there was more variety to the missions and battlefields. It felt like I was bullying the AI and, even as their stats inflated, they couldn’t do anything meaningful to counter my intensifying cheese. Enemies are also unable to use or react to melee weapons (or at least never did in my campaign), letting me just combo sword attacks against helpless foes when my hail-of-lead strategy was getting boring. In almost every battle they’d just run out of cover to engage me, even if they had indirect-fire missiles. I was a mindreader able to predict their every move, but I often didn’t have to. Phantom Brigade works best when you feel like a plucky guerrilla fighter working against the odds.Īt this point it dawned on me that the enemy were effectively mindless.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |