Phantom Brigade can’t convey the nuances of its own subversive mech combat

polygon.com:

Like any other turn-based strategy game, time stands still in Phantom Brigade while you issue orders. The giant robot pilots wait patiently and indefinitely for you to queue up their commands on a five-second timeline, the ghostly image of their future moves plotted on the map for reference. The crucial difference is that when you click the “execute” button, the game then switches to real-time, and every action happens all at once — not only does your team move simultaneously, but so does the enemy.

For five seconds, the battlefield is utter chaos, an entrancing flurry of projectiles and explosions and crumbling buildings caught in the metallic carnage. Then, periodically, while a rocket or a laser hangs in midair, time stops again for you to issue the next round of orders. Phantom Brigade, from Brace Yourself Games,is a series of intense five-second windows that, while not always intuitive, rarely fail to captivate.

Your team is small, a guerrilla strike force in the midst of an invasion by some nameless enemy country. As you trawl around the overworld map in your mobile base, looking for enemy patrols, convoys, and bases to hit, you find that the opposition always has more weapons and more pilots than you do. What they don’t have is the predictive technology that gives you the edge, depicting their future actions on the map.

Combat in Phantom Brigade is thus a white-knuckle state of perpetual counterattack, where you scrub back and forth along a timeline to see the paths the enemy units will take, and which of your units they will target, so that you may react accordingly. Phantom Brigade strikes a unique balance, where you feel omnipotent yet at the mercy of the complex systems that simulate each turn of every