Recent reviews by Solandis-X

This game sucks and I hate it.

5 stars.

Giant robots and sexy ladies, what's not to like?

Sincerely though, it's a quite fun game that understands how to properly drip-feed mechanics over time so as to not overwhelm you. I'm also pretty impressed at how reliable it is to just let the AI pilot for you.

Plus it's got a demo! Gotta encourage that. Too many games nowadays don't have demos. Madness.

I found this genuinely delightful.

If I wanted to be reductionist I would describe this game as "Being given a book of trivia, and then asked trivia questions."

And I mean. It IS that. It's that without a doubt. But also, that's exactly what I wanted from it.

If, like me, you've got a brain hardwired to remember completely impractical inane ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ (that is a compliment) then this game'll scratch so many of your itches.

Go on, scratch the itches.

Truth be told, my recommendation comes with a few caveats. But at the end of the day I think I'm largely positive towards Phantom Brigade.

This is important to know, because I'm gonna say a whole bunch of negative stuff about it real soon.

So, let's start with the positives.

The primary gameplay loop is quite fun. Designing your mech squad and commanding them is a pretty good time.

The visuals are pretty nice, I like how the robots look, though the more interesting ones visually are also quite rare so you might get bored of seeing the same mechs over and over.

Now for the negatives.

You may note that wasn't a lot of positives. Well strap in.

The story is largely nonexistent. It exists, there's a cutscene with spoken dialogue and then you're into the game. But overall it's very much in the background. The developers seem to think you wouldn't care about a story so it's very much out of the way.

So you remember how I said the main gameplay is fun? Well it is. But not really for 20 hours straight. Then it begins to become tedious.

Now, normally you'd solve that problem by introducing new equipment, new mechs, new weapons and so on. The problem is that all of that is part of the games random loot drop tables.

As just a word of advice to developers, that whole system of "getting the exact same equipment but with higher stats"? That sucks. That sucks and it's not fun or interesting. Please stop doing it. And especially don't combine it with rarity types! It makes post-combat looting feel completely uninteresting.

Another issue with the gameplay loop that I only really started to feel after 20 hours or so, just due to the nature of it, I can't get invested in what happens at all.

Due to fact that I'm commanding the entire team all at the same time and reviewing the combat as it happens all at once, it becomes difficult to focus on any one individual event or individual, which makes it difficult to really care or get invested in any individual part. And when you can't get invested in the individual, you begin to lose interest in the whole.

Which is further exacerbated by the music, or lack thereof. Now, to the soundtrack's credit. If you go listen to it in isolation (say on youtube) it's pretty good. The problem is when it comes to the actual game I can't friggin' hear it. It's either too dang quiet despite the fact that I've got music maxed out in the settings, or it's one of the tracks that are trying to be atmospheric. It's just very unengaging all around.

Plus the macro gameplay has nothing interesting going for it. It tries to, but it just doesn't succeed. In fairness, I don't think it NEEDS to be interesting, it just needs to functional; but when the micro gameplay starts to feel tedious the macro feels EVEN MORE tedious.

Like, why have events that force me to sit around literally doing nothing when there's nothing to endanger me? It takes 8 hours to resupply, but it's not like the enemies can invade territory I've already taken. Is the idea to dissuade me from retreating during the middle of an invasion and resupplying? That's probably it huh.

But the biggest sin of all, is they've made the cardinal sin of making giant robots somehow feel tiny and insignificant. Plenty of games make this mistake. And it sucks every time.

Ya gotta zoom in! Make big music! And even bigger sound effects! How is two massive slabs of metal crashing into each other so lowkey!

Also I have no idea how the hell melee combat works. I've had it work once or twice and it was very effective. But otherwise I whiff every time. And it's cheesing me off.

I genuinely really love this game. Everything's just so charming, which makes it so much more brutal when TERRIBLE things happen.

My lone criticism would be that I'm so overwhelmingly sick and tired of roguelikes and loop systems making you do the same things over and over just for a chance at progress. But that's more of a personal issue than anything else.

I watched a man get torn limb from limb by a ball of snakes.

Snakes that he himself shot out of a gun. Unsurprisingly, snakes don't like being shot out of a gun.

A genuinely delightful time if you have 2 or more friends.

It also allows you to very quickly learn who among your group of friends is the best at platforming.

Your friends will despise that person.

...It was me. I was the best. So much so that I no longer have friends. 10/10.

So I'm gonna preface this. This game isn't for everyone.

The main point of contention is the fact that, by design, even the smallest mistake can snowball into a mission loss. And when you couple that with the fact the game expects you to ironman every single mission...And the fact that later missions can take upwards of 2 HOURS...it's...it's a rough time.

The game also doesn't have a way to speed up time. Which, since a large part of the game is waiting for time to pass so you can see if you built your defenses well enough to survive a horde...it can get incredibly boring. Make sure to have either a second monitor to watch stuff on. Or a tv in the room. Or a phone. Anything. It's so boring sometimes. It sucks so much.

The campaign is...it exists. It's not the worst thing I've played. But 70% of the missions start off the exact same way, so it can get repetitive really fast. The Hero missions are pretty fun, but also they have a pixel-hunting mechanic in them that will drive you insane if you're in any way a completionist. Also, the "destroy enemy" missions, are very bad. They seem fun at first, but you will almost instantly figure out the optimal strategy. And then you will only do that. And they become very boring, very quickly.

But yeah, if you want a fairly difficult game to smash your head against, and don't mind some repetition. Then give it a shot! I enjoyed it, and hope they come out with more official stuff to do.

And hopefully they'll have learned from all the mistakes they made. One can only hope.

If you think two bucks is a good price for 326 MBs of PNGs, then who am I to stop you.

A fun thing to note though is the 6 witch images are about 30 MB each. All the other ones are about 5-8 MBs each. It really lends credence to my whole "They just commissioned the art rather than hiring an artist" theory.

Also, the 2nd batch of witch images are...animated kinda? In that they deliberately wash out their colors after about two seconds. It's very odd.

I'm genuinely baffled.

Like. Nothing here makes sense. I'm so confused.

Let's break it down super fast.

The Story: The English text was not written by someone who was fluent in English. But also it makes so many references and uses so many slang terms, most of them correctly, that...I don't even know how they did it. It's very odd. It made me feel very unstable while reading it which is probably why so many of the jokes actually made me laugh. It's a real hell of an experience. The story itself is...fine, I think. The writing threw me off so bad that I can't even judge it properly. Also, for some reason there's just...no ending at all? Like. At all? It leads up to one, and then doesn't deliver? Maybe it's my fault for playing the game offline and not getting the achievements? I don't know. And I don't know if I want to play through again to find out.

Edit: So I did go back to check, it turns out the achievements are just straight up broken and don't trigger no matter what. I presume this is also the case with the whole "no ending at all" situation. So that's fun.

The Visuals: They're better than Halloween SEX Party. They're still almost definitely cheap commissions from a bunch of different artists. So it's still inconsistent as hell. But it's closer. It's almost acceptable.

The Characters: I...I don't know. Again, the writing threw me off so bad that I can't judge them properly. They're fine I guess?

The Gameplay: Better puzzles and better integration when compared to Halloween SEX Party. It's almost fun. Almost. I'm at least not actively furious while playing them.

The Porn: Still completely disconnected from the plot. No one ever has sex in the story. Like, come on guys. If you're gonna include ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, then write some stuff for characters ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Still visually inconsistent. But it'd be acceptable if it were actually integrated into the plot in some way. Which it's not. So it's not. Also, y'know those stock-ass anime moans that are in the trailer? They're not in the game. Somehow the sound for...everything, but especially the porn, is even more stock and lazy than it was for the trailer, which was already a 10/10 for stock laziness.

I'm so confused by everything involved here. There's better games, there's better porn and there's WAY better porn games.

But I mean, I don't regret buying it. So...that's something?