Broken Lines (Switch) Review
Release Date: February 25, 2020 (PC), April 23, 2020 (Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4)
Publisher/Developer: Super.com/Porta Play
Platform: PC, Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4
Price: $24.99
Tactical RPGs are my bread and butter. I love thinking my way through a scenario and finding the best path to victory. Most of my experience with the series has been through fantasy settings such as Final Fantasy or Fire Emblem. In real battle, though, nobody is going to wait their turn as a single fighter has a one-on-one battle; the entire field will be chaos. I also enjoy Real-Time Strategy RPGs like Starcraft and (Vanilla, original, not World Of) Warcraft, but recognize that a single hive mind for an entire platoon doesn’t show a true battle either.
Broken Lines attempts to give an amalgamation of the two. Set in an alternate World War II, a group of eight soldiers: some veteran and some new recruits, are stranded behind enemy lines and must fight to survive. A traditional planning phase occurs during battle, but instead of setting one character on their way, you plan out waypoints and actions for every character you have on the field and press “play.” The next eight seconds play out immediately, with every one of your soldiers and every single enemy acting simultaneously. These eight seconds are unstoppable: the only thing that ever changes this is when you encounter a new enemy, as it instantly pauses and resets the clock. Outside of that, you live life eight seconds at a time, which can feel like an eternity if you don’t plan properly.
Real world battle strategies come into effect in Broken Lines. When that eight-second pause comes up, you can lay down cover fire as another character flanks the enemy. Sneaking around and finding high ground turns enemies into fish in a barrel, while walking into a clearing and finding an enemy sniping from high can lead to certain doom.
Between skirmishes players can customize their loadout. Each soldier has their own traits and personality quirks which can emerge on the battlefield. You can also add other traits, as well as weapons and medical supplies to augment their abilities. These eight soldiers are wonderfully unique, and those unique personalities are driven home in the battlefield as well. Their personalities and attitudes towards war may clash, and soldiers on the field will work together and even form friendships. These bonds effect a separate meter showing your troops’ stress levels in the battle, and that can change how they react to your orders. Whilst individual battles may be retried, this meter increases on retry. With only eight troops and permadeath, sometimes it’s a balance to see whether you value the individual members of your squad or the sanity of the entire team. Each time you make a choice it reflects on how well the squad as a whole can perform. It can be as simple as which road to take to whether to gun down civilians to take their supplies, bettering your squad’s chances at survival.
The main battle plays out with this unique eight second round moveset. It takes a bit to get used to, as the chaos of war can take it’s toll. Enemies are dynamically moving at the same time as your team, so that grenade you threw might land in an empty clearing if the enemies were leaving when you “threw” it in the pause. Similarly, I was frustrated when I’d set up a heal only for the route that my teammate was on led them right out of the heal zone instead of focusing on the individual. A few times I felt like the route planned for a character wasn’t followed, but that could also be explained by the stress meters. The combination buttons for Switch would annoy me as there are times you have to hold a button, select from a wheel, and release that wouldn’t feel like they “stuck.” There’s also a requirement to move all members every eight seconds, which is okay in firefights but pretty rough when you have to move the entire team across the map with no action happening. I know that they are looking for a uniform experience, but the game is set up for mousework from the PC and a handheld touchscreen option is welcome and hopefully patched in one day. On a side note, the game requests you go through a tutorial before the prologue. All well and good, but it’s eight separate things with lengthy load screens between compared to the amount of action you do during the tutorial segment. It was tedious and honestly took up my entire first game session when that kind of information could have been integrated into the prologue, especially since the game could pause every time it needs to introduce you to a new mechanic.
Negatives aside, Broken Lines takes the tactics of a turn based SRPG and melds them with the chaos of a real time SRPG, with a dash of Mass Effect choicemaking that can lead to roguelike permadeath. It is helpful and very appreciated that you can customize several different aspects from player and enemy damage multipliers to how much the composure meter is hit on a retry. Tweaking these bits can make the game as hard or as easy as you want, so you can enjoy the story as the game progresses. With many different chances for members of the 8-party team to die, I see several different branching paths and stories leading to excellent replayability as you test the limits of your bonds and friendships, making the tough choices that happen in war in the hopes of survival.
Pros:
-Tough choices and uneasy alliances within the team make for a tense gameplay experience
-The “eight seconds at a time” live turn-based gameplay give more action and more strategy to real-time
-Real world battle strategies and effective team-based maneuvers can turn the tide
-Full customization of nuances of the difficulty curve
Cons:
-Eight Second Rule can be frustrating as targets leave action area or die before they can make a difference
-Controls would benefit from touchscreen support
-Tutorial should have been integrated into one unit, or perhaps into the story itself
Special thanks to Super.com and Porta Play for providing a code for review!