Azira
Arcane
Hello dear readers! Since I've finished UFO After- trilogy of LPs, I decided I'd want to try something different. I happened upon this little game called Metal Brigade Tactics.
It promises to be "a turn-based tactical strategy game with deep RPG elements" in which you "control your squad of Vertical Armor giant robots on a mission to stop a small country from embroiling the world in a devastating war".
I haven't played this game before at all, having just bought it. But I thought it might be fun to do a blind LP of this little game. It seems simple enough, and with just 19 missions in the campaign, I'll not overexert myself. M:
Table of contents
1: Killing our CO and going rogue
2: Second mission, 3 wipes
3: Raining fire from above
4: Death by timelimit
Alright, let's start off with some screenshots shall we. First up is the developer.
Never heard of them. It's an indie developer, currently with only this and one other game to their name. Once I've finished this LP and consequently the game, I'll divulge my thoughts on their efforts.
The start menu, complete with game tips! Alright, we hit the campaign button immediately. No messing about here.
We can even have several campaigns going simultaneously? That's nice I guess, but I don't really see the need, except if you share this game with another person, who plays on the same computer when you're not around. If so, I guess that's cool.
We start a new campaign with the mighty Codex being our star pilot! We're doing this on hard difficulty, should be fun in a blind LP. Let's see if my skills are up to it. I'll reload if everything goes to shit, but I'll try to keep this semi-ironman for now. I might regret this later though..
The description leads me to think of Mechwarrior, the board game. It seems rather obvious that this was their inspiration. I don't mind. I quite liked that game, even if I rarely got to play it.
Alright, we click "play" and immediately we're transported to the battlefield, where we start a tutorial mission.
Right. They're certainly keeping it simple for our first mission. One VA and we've been told to go south for our first move. Even I can follow those kinds of directions.
Point and click, every command is so far intuitive. We click end turn, and the others get to move.
Our dreaded enemy, the CPC doesn't seem to want to move at all. Ohwell, our allies' turn is next.
At least they're mobile and moving. But what's this? Someone else is on the command channel.
Ooo, tense! Central command is telling us to stand down, and our commanding officer is in blatant disregard of those orders! What are we to do? But wait, who's that on the road there?
So a complete stranger shows up and urges us to attack our CO? A complete stranger who has trouble remembering the proper code-phrase? Whatever are we to do or believe?
It seems we're at an impasse.
Tutorial messages to the rescue. We need to attack and destroy our CO. Great! Let's get trigger happy then!
So we click our mech ... sorry, VA, and we can choose to attack instead of move. Then we can choose which of our weapons to attack with. Got it, still seems simple enough.
We choose our missile launcher, as it seems to do more damage.
We attack, he counters, and the turn ends. Simple and easy!
The CPC still doesn't budge, and of the three allied robots on the left part of the map, one of them seems to've chosen our side, the two others have sided with the CO. Good thing they're busy shooting at eachother and none of them peels off to target us.
Now it's the CO's turn.
Oooo, crit hit! Ouch.
And we do normal damage in return.
The three VAs on the left part of the map are still duking it out amongst themselves, but I've done the math, and unless we do a crit hit ourselves, it seems we're not too well off against the CO..
We don't and it's game over! In the tutorial mission, we can lose the entire game? Well, I'm not deterred that easily and I start over.
This time I get smart and maneuver our VA a step more to the south, meaning the CO doesn't get to retaliate against one of our attacks, as he has chosen a melee weapon. In addition to this, on the following turn we manage to dodge his ranged attack!
Feel the burn! We move a step further south and light up with cannon fire.
The COs stats must obviously be superior to ours, since he can do more damage with a similar rifle than we. Happily, we're attacking this turn, meaning we deal damage first, and since he only has 8 hitpoints left, he's toast unless he dodges..
Success! And we get xp and a levelup!
Now to spend our level-up point!
We choose weaponry as I want to see us deal more damage quickly. We can also see that there's something called "perks". We haven't got any yet, but I presume that's only a matter of time.
Now that our CO is toast, the mysterious "Callisto" more info for us.
Heh! She's certainly blunt about it. After committing treason, it's a good idea to make one self scarce. Got it.
The tutorial agent also chimes in.
Move to the exit grid to finish the mission, and you can save/load the game while in the tactical screen. Got it. The latter I'm only going to use by saving the game at the start of each mission. No save-scumming.
The other three robots continue shooting at eachother while we make our escape.
We reach the exit grid quickly, and we get a few more words from Callisto and the tutorial agent before getting our mission result screen.
More hitpoints sounds useful. I wonder how much the 1900 credits turn out to be worth though. The higher difficulty setting promises better loot. For the tutorial mission this translates to a total of 1900 credits on hard, vs 1800 credits on normal (I ran this mission once on normal for comparison, I haven't played the next mission yet).
Now we get to the "campaign hub screen". The first tab on that screen is the e-mail tab, and there's already mail waiting for us.
Wait, what? That's not how it happened! This reminds me of a cheap movie-plot.. I wonder how the rest of the story plays out. If Arnold makes an appearance I'm going to cheer. Literally. that film, for all it's cheesiness.
Well, we click the next tab, the pilot tab.
There's currently two pilots available, us and Callisto. We're riding a "saber" VA, sporting a ranged cannon and a missile launcher, while Callisto is riding a "stiletto" sporting a machine gun and an energy shiv. The latter is a close-combat weapon. We can learn a bit more about these weapons in the next tab, the garage tab.
Here we can see what equipment we currently have available. Not much to look at yet. But we can click on the VAs in the first garage tab and customize our rides!
I decide to mount the hp accessory on our VA, as we are obviously more important than Callisto, so we should be the beefier VA.
The stiletto seems to be a more agile, scout-like VA with better range and dodge scores, but more fragile and with a lower weight limit. The energy shiv seems useful in that it doesn't use ammo, but uses "battery". This is a concept we haven't had explained to us yet, but I expect that to be rectified in the next mission. I assume it recharges during the mission, but we'll see.
The next tab lets us go shopping.
Additional VAs are expensive, but weapons not so. We seem to be well equipped weapon-wise however, so we go directly to the accessory tab.
Where we buy an armor upgrade and a single-use ammo refill.
First I toy with the idea of equipping us with both the health and armour boost, and giving the ammo refill to Callisto.
In the end however, I decide to give Callisto extra armour, as she will need to get close to the enemy to cause damage, and since we're sporting a missile launcher which can fire only 6 times in a mission, I think it wise to bring a refill. Maybe I should have saved the cash, but what the hey, I'm allowed to make stupid mistakes in my own blind LP.
Finally there's the mission tab.
The second mission is called "Dodging Cheddar"?!?
At this point, I'm cautiously optimistic about this game. I don't know if we'll be faced with any CnC, but fooling around with customizing our VA and choosing perks and skillups seems like it could be fun.
All in all, this seems to be off to a good start.
It promises to be "a turn-based tactical strategy game with deep RPG elements" in which you "control your squad of Vertical Armor giant robots on a mission to stop a small country from embroiling the world in a devastating war".
I haven't played this game before at all, having just bought it. But I thought it might be fun to do a blind LP of this little game. It seems simple enough, and with just 19 missions in the campaign, I'll not overexert myself. M:
Table of contents
1: Killing our CO and going rogue
2: Second mission, 3 wipes
3: Raining fire from above
4: Death by timelimit
Alright, let's start off with some screenshots shall we. First up is the developer.
Never heard of them. It's an indie developer, currently with only this and one other game to their name. Once I've finished this LP and consequently the game, I'll divulge my thoughts on their efforts.
The start menu, complete with game tips! Alright, we hit the campaign button immediately. No messing about here.
We can even have several campaigns going simultaneously? That's nice I guess, but I don't really see the need, except if you share this game with another person, who plays on the same computer when you're not around. If so, I guess that's cool.
We start a new campaign with the mighty Codex being our star pilot! We're doing this on hard difficulty, should be fun in a blind LP. Let's see if my skills are up to it. I'll reload if everything goes to shit, but I'll try to keep this semi-ironman for now. I might regret this later though..
The description leads me to think of Mechwarrior, the board game. It seems rather obvious that this was their inspiration. I don't mind. I quite liked that game, even if I rarely got to play it.
Alright, we click "play" and immediately we're transported to the battlefield, where we start a tutorial mission.
Right. They're certainly keeping it simple for our first mission. One VA and we've been told to go south for our first move. Even I can follow those kinds of directions.
Point and click, every command is so far intuitive. We click end turn, and the others get to move.
Our dreaded enemy, the CPC doesn't seem to want to move at all. Ohwell, our allies' turn is next.
At least they're mobile and moving. But what's this? Someone else is on the command channel.
Ooo, tense! Central command is telling us to stand down, and our commanding officer is in blatant disregard of those orders! What are we to do? But wait, who's that on the road there?
So a complete stranger shows up and urges us to attack our CO? A complete stranger who has trouble remembering the proper code-phrase? Whatever are we to do or believe?
It seems we're at an impasse.
Tutorial messages to the rescue. We need to attack and destroy our CO. Great! Let's get trigger happy then!
So we click our mech ... sorry, VA, and we can choose to attack instead of move. Then we can choose which of our weapons to attack with. Got it, still seems simple enough.
We choose our missile launcher, as it seems to do more damage.
We attack, he counters, and the turn ends. Simple and easy!
The CPC still doesn't budge, and of the three allied robots on the left part of the map, one of them seems to've chosen our side, the two others have sided with the CO. Good thing they're busy shooting at eachother and none of them peels off to target us.
Now it's the CO's turn.
Oooo, crit hit! Ouch.
And we do normal damage in return.
The three VAs on the left part of the map are still duking it out amongst themselves, but I've done the math, and unless we do a crit hit ourselves, it seems we're not too well off against the CO..
We don't and it's game over! In the tutorial mission, we can lose the entire game? Well, I'm not deterred that easily and I start over.
This time I get smart and maneuver our VA a step more to the south, meaning the CO doesn't get to retaliate against one of our attacks, as he has chosen a melee weapon. In addition to this, on the following turn we manage to dodge his ranged attack!
Feel the burn! We move a step further south and light up with cannon fire.
The COs stats must obviously be superior to ours, since he can do more damage with a similar rifle than we. Happily, we're attacking this turn, meaning we deal damage first, and since he only has 8 hitpoints left, he's toast unless he dodges..
Success! And we get xp and a levelup!
Now to spend our level-up point!
We choose weaponry as I want to see us deal more damage quickly. We can also see that there's something called "perks". We haven't got any yet, but I presume that's only a matter of time.
Now that our CO is toast, the mysterious "Callisto" more info for us.
Heh! She's certainly blunt about it. After committing treason, it's a good idea to make one self scarce. Got it.
The tutorial agent also chimes in.
Move to the exit grid to finish the mission, and you can save/load the game while in the tactical screen. Got it. The latter I'm only going to use by saving the game at the start of each mission. No save-scumming.
The other three robots continue shooting at eachother while we make our escape.
We reach the exit grid quickly, and we get a few more words from Callisto and the tutorial agent before getting our mission result screen.
More hitpoints sounds useful. I wonder how much the 1900 credits turn out to be worth though. The higher difficulty setting promises better loot. For the tutorial mission this translates to a total of 1900 credits on hard, vs 1800 credits on normal (I ran this mission once on normal for comparison, I haven't played the next mission yet).
Now we get to the "campaign hub screen". The first tab on that screen is the e-mail tab, and there's already mail waiting for us.
Wait, what? That's not how it happened! This reminds me of a cheap movie-plot.. I wonder how the rest of the story plays out. If Arnold makes an appearance I'm going to cheer. Literally. that film, for all it's cheesiness.
Well, we click the next tab, the pilot tab.
There's currently two pilots available, us and Callisto. We're riding a "saber" VA, sporting a ranged cannon and a missile launcher, while Callisto is riding a "stiletto" sporting a machine gun and an energy shiv. The latter is a close-combat weapon. We can learn a bit more about these weapons in the next tab, the garage tab.
Here we can see what equipment we currently have available. Not much to look at yet. But we can click on the VAs in the first garage tab and customize our rides!
I decide to mount the hp accessory on our VA, as we are obviously more important than Callisto, so we should be the beefier VA.
The stiletto seems to be a more agile, scout-like VA with better range and dodge scores, but more fragile and with a lower weight limit. The energy shiv seems useful in that it doesn't use ammo, but uses "battery". This is a concept we haven't had explained to us yet, but I expect that to be rectified in the next mission. I assume it recharges during the mission, but we'll see.
The next tab lets us go shopping.
Additional VAs are expensive, but weapons not so. We seem to be well equipped weapon-wise however, so we go directly to the accessory tab.
Where we buy an armor upgrade and a single-use ammo refill.
First I toy with the idea of equipping us with both the health and armour boost, and giving the ammo refill to Callisto.
In the end however, I decide to give Callisto extra armour, as she will need to get close to the enemy to cause damage, and since we're sporting a missile launcher which can fire only 6 times in a mission, I think it wise to bring a refill. Maybe I should have saved the cash, but what the hey, I'm allowed to make stupid mistakes in my own blind LP.
Finally there's the mission tab.
The second mission is called "Dodging Cheddar"?!?
At this point, I'm cautiously optimistic about this game. I don't know if we'll be faced with any CnC, but fooling around with customizing our VA and choosing perks and skillups seems like it could be fun.
All in all, this seems to be off to a good start.