When I first played the demo for Phantom Brigade, I realised it did something I'd been wanting from games for years. It's a turn-based game that uses the magic of our computer boxes to produce fantastic action scenes. Not only that, they're action scenes featuring giant robots, which astute readers may have noticed I have a fondness for. (Taking screenshots, I should add, has been an absolute joy, as I've scrubbed back and forth through each turn's timeline, rotating and zooming the camera to find the perfect angle of huge mecha smashing into each other and exploding.)
There's nothing particularly original in how Phantom Brigade achieves this. It's essentially Frozen Synapse blended with Into the Breach, with a dash of Battletech for good measure. You have a squad of mechs with which to engage in turn-based battles with enemy mechs and tanks. Rather than moving and shooting with each unit in sequence, you plan out the actions of your squad over each five-second turn, then hit the execute button and watch your tactical brilliance play out in real time. Where Into the Breach comes in, other than the big robots, is your ability to see the predicted actions of your opponent. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say, and you can use your Cassandra-like powers of prophecy to move out of enemy fire arcs and line up perfect kill shots of your own.
This core combat, when it works, is absolutely bloody brilliant. Your mechs weave balletically through streams of bullets, gliding past each other with precision and unleashing laser, bullet and missile-flavoured death. Once you get the hang of the slightly abstruse melee attacks, your sword-swinging units can swoop past opposing mechs and slice off limbs, or smash into lighter foes to knock them down before swiftly dispatching them. Get it wrong, usually by missing the fact that you're going to run two of your units into each other, or accidentally wandering into a stream of bullets, and chaos ensues.