Grit And Valor 1949 is a real-time Into The Breach, or at least vaguely similar enough that I can squeeze a more popular game in this headline
Like, 10% maybe, if I'm being honest
Grit And Valor 1949 certainly evokes the tactics of Into The Breach, with its stompy machinery and floating tile battlegrounds. But, despite all appearances, this one isn’t actually turn-based at all. A tiley, tiny real time strategy then? Aye, and one that’s actually pretty frantic as it happens. Missions are snappy, intense skirmishes. You’ll fight off waves while trying to protect your useless, freeloading command vehicle. This threat, combined with on-the-fly tactical consider-me-do's like utilising cover and keeping rock-paper-scissors matchups in your favour ends up spawning something quite distinct. Please, do stomp on, preferably with less hypens for all our sakes.
Set in an alternate World War II, in which Europe has been destroyed by officious enemy commanders aggressively wielding grandiloquent moustaches, Grit And Valor 1949 has you play as an allied resistance force campaigning to plant a very large EMP in the Axis base. Set the device, and reduce all their scary mechs to so many spent disposable vapes and Apple products that have passed their preprogrammed obsolescence counter. It’s got some mid-mission rogue-y bits where you’ll progress down a mission tree, collecting upgrades and doing some mech tinkering. The meat of it is the missions, where you’ll command a team of rock-paper-scissors aligned mechs to fend off enemy waves, and maybe do some sub-objective capturing too.
These tiles keep lying to me, making me expect some sort of action economy, but no! You can move your mechs around freely. Really, the tiles are just there to signify your stomper’s firing range. There’s cover dotted about the map, as well as terrain advantages, so you end up rushing to set up little phalanxes between waves. There’s even extra mech abilities, like mine laying and the Mech Special, i.e a large jump that crushes whatever it lands on. It’s very much a learn-as-you-do game. The tutorial is solid as far as teaching the basics, but even the first mission drops a lot of different options on your plate as far as approaches go. The initial enemies are quite weak, to be fair, so there’s a margin for error here. I think it’s cool! Lots of ideas, really good energy to it. Also, mechs.
Best of all, there’s a demo on Steam at time of writing. If you like your mechs buried behind about 800% more interface, however, Edwin has you covered. Unrelated, but has anyone made a mech game about giant evil Furbys with no fur yet? That’d go unbelievably hard, I reckon.