Placement of units on advantageous terrain is critical to success, as is the way that they’re equipped, as it can affect the special attacks and support abilities that they have access to. Where Mount & Blade’s action plays out in real-time, in Battle Brothers it’s turn-based, and complexly so. The world – and the kinds of contracts that you can take on – is randomly-generated with each campaign, and while this does mean that questing becomes very repetitive (“take XXX to city YYY”-like quests, and “hunt and kill ZZZ”-combat missions occupy most of your first few hours play, though it does broaden, slightly, in the later game), it also means that you can never be sure of what’s ahead, so you’ll need to manage your band to prepare for every encounter. What starts as a rag-tag mob of societies’ cast-offs eventually blossoms into a hardened group of deadly veterans. It works a little like a turn-based take on Mount & Blade you form a growing mercenary army by taking on and completing contracts, and then using the money to hire and equip new mercenaries into your band. The sad thing is that it’s going to lose players based on its incompetent onboarding that would otherwise love it, because once you get over that initial hump (or, in this case, mountain), Battle Brothers has a lot to like. Throw in a pretty clumsy interface on the Nintendo Switch that likes throwing big blocks of text at you to wade through everywhere that you point the cursor, and I don’t think I’ve ever come across a game so openly hostile to new players. I’m not new to RPGs, tactics games, strategy, or any other genre Battle Brothers is adjacent to, and this game required a lot of early-stages guesswork from me as to how it works. So many of the game’s critical underlying systems are so obtuse and not immediately apparent that I didn’t even notice that there was cheap equipment for low-level characters until someone in my first-play stream explained it to me… I’d been struggling to buy the premium stuff that I just didn’t need at that stage of the game from the weaponsmiths. The easiest of the “proper” quests will often throw near-impossible battles at new players that won’t understand why they’ve ended up in the mess. And the “tutorial” quest is more than happy to destroy the player’s armies. What is being called a “tutorial” in the game just… isn’t, really. Battle Brothers is going to lose a lot of potential fans because it point-blank refuses to teach them how to play.
But, if you are going to go down the route of unforgiving complexity, the least you can do is make sure there is an adequate tutorial and learning curve to give players a chance. Just this week I reviewed a simulation title, in A-Train, that comes dangerously close to being a genuine degree in urban planning and an MBA, rolled into one.
I’m all for games being complex, challenging, and unforgiving.
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