"Fortunately, the bland campaign and narrative aren't quite dead weight, as Phantom Brigade's mechs are very satisfying to blow apart" But the salvage screen is a mess, forcing lots of scrolling of the 30% of screen space that does anything, and not letting you sort, compare items, or even see what you have in storage.
Lost parts can be salvaged, but it's more expensive than recovering intact ones from enemies who've bailed or passed out, pushing you to modify your designs often. Lower-level weapons can outperform those the game judges better, because of perk/attachment combos, and because the game apparently judges relative strengths very differently from me. Gear is both levelled and tiered and often has slots for more modifications in addition to the innate perks, letting you build almost any design you have parts for. There are plenty of stock models as a baseline, but many come with attached perks, so a railgun could vent heat faster, or an arm comes with extra plating.
Enemies use partially randomised gear, all fully lootable. A light mech could be significantly tougher than a medium, a heavy could have multiple light limbs. The resulting mass might classify as "light", but that only determines who can barge who else over. There aren't strictly delineated types, mind instead of fixed chassis with guns welded on, you get big lego bots with parts stuck together as you like. In its defence, the same is true of the enemy, giving great value to speedy light mechs who can sow chaos by tricking them into shooting each other. This is annoying but potentially disastrous as they're now shooting not at its original destination, but where it fell, even if that means shooting a teammate in the back (you can aim at a location instead, but this tends to be hopelessly inaccurate), or crashing into your unexpectedly downed ally. No plan survives contact with the enemy, but your mechs will stick resolutely to one anyway, firing another four shots at an already dead target.
There's less need to account for every possible direction a target could go, but the volume of enemy fire makes reckless play suicidal even before considering the strategic map layer. Phantom Brigade gives you foreknowledge of the enemy's moves (as opposed to Frozen Synapse, where you also had to second guess and gamble on their behaviour), so it feels like you should decide quickly, but where I found it a little too easy two years ago, combat is now fairly punishing. Half the point of real-time, turn-based hybrids is to test your ability to coordinate and counteract. These orders fill in on a timeline at the bottom of the screen which, if hovered over, displays little phantoms on the field to demonstrate what everyone will be doing at any given movement, and where your rifleman and your shotgunner are going to run into each other, oops. Each turn, you plan exactly where they go and who to shoot at, drawing various lines on the map for movement and targeting. It's tempting to add "it's big stompy mechs innit" to that, but only a few hours in I was thinking of them as robots, so slavishly obedient are they to the timeline you set out. I am enjoying it a lot, despite some frustration. The result is a game that's taken me absolutely ages, but whose numbers suggest I'm supposed to be blasting through without a care. There's probably a metaphor in there somewhere about writing, video editing, or catering. In practice, behind those few seconds are an eternity of theorising, testing, and tweaking. You finish your turn by hitting a button that makes everyone go at once for a few explosive moments. That time is divided into five-second chunks during which you're shown what the enemy will do, and must use that to coordinate your own mechs, placing their orders on a visible timeline. According to its internal clock, battles usually take less than a minute. I'm still not entirely sure if I'm playing Phantom Brigade right. Satisfying and spectacular mech fights, let down but thankfully not sunk by frictious menus and a mediocre strategy layer.
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