Brigandine Abyss Review (PS5)

Brigandine Abyss is a tactical role-playing game that requires little tactical nous, and in its early hours bombards you with menus and systems, many of which feel superfluous and fiddly. It doesn't make a great first impression.

It begins with you choosing which campaign you want to play. There are six, and each puts you in control of a different faction, with a different lead character.

You make this decision without any real context for who these factions are, or what's going on, and so it really just comes down to which characters you like the look of most.

The six campaigns basically play out the same way, only you start in a different town and there are a few different cutscenes and conversations. But 95% of the experience is the same no matter which you pick.

When the game begins proper, you're treated to a cutscene in which a character is introduced, and before I even had the chance to finish saying "I bet he turns out to be the villain," the guy has assassinated the king in front of his own daughter.

This betrayal happens approximately nine seconds into the game, before we know who this man is, or who the king is, and we only know it's the king's daughter in attendance because she says "Father?!" as he's eviscerated.

You're then thrown into a battle. The first battle is basically the same across the campaigns. It's you, your bestie, and some fodder against a few baddies.

The arena is broken up into hexagonal tiles, and combat is turn-based. Each unit on your team gets a turn, and then the enemies go. In a turn you can move a set number of hexagonal spaces, and you can also take an action, but some actions can't be taken after moving — big spells, that kinda thing.

So you move every unit one at a time but the baddies are too far away so you can't act. Then the baddies move all their units one at a time but you're too far away so they can't act. You do this until you're close enough to each other to do anything.

It's like that bit in Austin Powers when the guy is waiting for the incredibly slow steamroller to run him over.

The pace of combat is glacial, and it's one of the bigger problems with the game. There's no such thing as a quick scrap in Brigandine Abyss. Every combat encounter is going to wipe half an hour off your day.

Exacerbating the problem is that the combat is incredibly easy, mostly. For a strategy RPG there's not much strategy required to win. The game has a few quirks you can exploit for profit, and exploit them I did.

First, every time anyone attacks in this game the defending unit gets a counter attack. It's not a skill you unlock, it's automatic, so you can front-load your party with tanky units and do a lot of damage to enemies just by being attacked.

Each party has up to three leaders and then those leaders can have up to five monster units in their group. But if the leader dies, the monsters all disappear too. So you can just swarm the leaders and wipe out entire platoons in one go.

The enemy AI is borderline suicidal at times and will often walk right into the traps you've set up. And the charm spell seems overpowered, since it turns units against their own team and can be used on basically any enemy except mechanical ones and a couple of bosses.

Some arenas have terrain issues to contend with, but generally speaking, you can do pretty much the same thing every fight. Just let the enemy come to you, tanks out front, mages behind, and the bad guys are toast.

On top of that, there's no permadeath here like in other tactical RPGs, and the items that allow you to resurrect defeated units are abundant. Coupled with a generous auto-save system, it means there's really no risk to battle at all.

For as slow and tedious as the combat is, the story is the opposite. It moves so quickly at times that it's actually unintentionally quite funny. There are betrayals and forgivings that happen two sentences apart. Everyone talks to each other like there's loads of history between them but we don't know it.

It's like starting Game of Thrones at the final season, but only watching the highlights of each episode on a YouTube compilation.

Villains are of the moustache-twirling variety. The heroes are plucky. The characters mostly adhere to anime stereotypes. There are some wild haircuts. A few anatomically improbable women. There's one that looks like a mid-2000s emo kid, and another that looks like a ninja if there was a ninja in the movie Clueless.

Sadly, most of the characters have generic character models in combat. There are a few with unique models that match their portraits, but a lot of the time you'll have a fella with long white hair and a beard in conversation, and then you have a fight and he's bald.

Between battles you can organise your troops, and level up both them and your cities. You can change equipment on both you and your monsters. I'm not sure why your party is made up of monsters. Are they deeply patriotic monsters defending their homes? Do we have them under some kind of spell?

Whatever the reasoning is, there's something inherently amusing about equipping a unicorn with a battle axe. It's got hooves. What's going on here? The logistics of an axe-wielding unicorn aside, its stats go up when you give it an axe, so give it an axe.

After organisation comes attack. That means attacking another city, conquering them, and then them joining you with a smile despite you being the invading army. No explanation seemed to be given for why we're conquering cities that have nothing to do with our conflict.

At one point in one of the campaigns, one of the characters says something like, "I can't believe we're attacking our peaceful neighbours... oh well, it can't be helped!" It can't be helped? It can be helped. Don't invade them.

I actually tried playing peacefully at first and not invading neighbouring factions. It's rubbish, and it doesn't work.

So instead I was basically Genghis Khan. I invaded everyone. I slaughtered the peaceful religious recluses of the mountain. I put the fairy people of the forest to the sword. I erased entire bloodlines from history.

I left devastation in my wake, and the people of the nation fell under my rule, and they were all pretty okay with it as it happens, and they joined my team with a winning smile. Weird.

There's probably something to say about the sanitisation of imperial conquest here, but I'm not going to say it because I don't care. I'm the king and nobody can stop me.

Anyway, you take over the map, fight battles, level up, over and over and then kill the big boss and you win. The first campaign took me around thirty hours, but honestly, I had no idea what I was doing. The second was twenty hours. The third a little less.

Despite all the problems and quirks, I actually ended up liking the game, but it did take a while to click. And by a while I mean like fifteen hours. And it clicked in a very specific way.

I liked it in the same way as I enjoy winning a cultural victory in Civilization, or I feel satisfied after grinding to level up my party in Dragon Quest. There's something addictive about conquering, levelling up, and building your empire.