Battle Brothers’ Xbox outing finally brings one of the best strategy games to the TV

Battle Brothers has finally brought its turn-based tactics to the Xbox, and it’s an almost perfect port, only held back by some controller and UI decisions.

I’ve made my thoughts on Battle Brothers well known over the last few years, having originally followed it since it was back in its prototype, pitching days. It’s a formula I adore. You take the army-management, open-world systems of Mount and Blade and you fuse them with team-based RPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics, Vandal Hearts and Fire Emblem. You’re left with a game where you’re delicately balancing the resources of a travelling band where nobody has a massive backstory but every single person has to have a speciality and purpose in order to survive.

If that sounds exhausting then maybe it’s not a game for you. If you get too attached to characters early and stumble upon an orc ambush without properly prepared then it can leave your dozen farmhands and miners decimated; Keep punching on with that campaign though and those tattered remains might just play a part in delaying the destruction of civilisation and make a tidy bag of gold on the way.

Battle Brothers rewards those who don’t rush in blindly, in fact, preparation is king. Weapons come in a variety of different forms, there are blunt, slashing, stabbing and more weapons, each available in two-handed or one-handed forms. Each of these weapons has different types of attack — a difference from most RPGs which simply have an ‘attack’, ‘block’ or ‘special’ options — and even similar weapons do different types of damage to different things. As an example, you might give one unit a two-handed sword, and another a two-handed hammer. That sword will be great against unarmoured enemies, especially if you can clip somebody around the head, however, it’ll only do so much damage against armour itself. The hammer, however, does crushing damage, it’ll do vastly more damage to armour, but less to the unarmoured. However, it’s not just down to weapons, because each character also has fatigue to worry about; most people wearing heavy armour or holding heavy weapons really can’t move much or do many attacks within their turns.

Sounds pretty simple. Light armour and light weapons mean more movement, certain weapons are better against certain degrees of armour and protection. However, enemies come in an equally varied manner. There’s no point in being heavily armoured when your squad of eight are being ambushed by four-dozen spiders in the woods, your sweeping attacks won’t mean anything when you’re webbed, poisoned and unable to move. Similarly, if your lightly armoured gang of skirmishers don’t have shields then they won’t want to come up against dire wolves, which can attack three times in a turn.

There’s so much variety in enemies and weapons that it’s basically impossible to prepare for every situation. However, you can very specifically tool yourself for multiple situations. Give your archers and crossbowmen a set of weapons in case they get caught in melee, give some of your sword-and-shield fighters two-handed weapons, or even load up some people with weapons that can attack over multiple tiles — things like whips and long-spears. Maybe your strategy will revolve around a shield- or spear-wall. Maybe you’ll have dogs or hawks with your troops to maul, distract or scout the enemies. There’s a ridiculous amount of strategies, and this was only added to with each of the expansions… the Desert-based expansion even added a slave system and area of effect weapons… The addition of a slave system adds a whole layer to paying and feeding your warriors, but then so does the ability to recruit specialists who are like major buffs to your party.

In short, Battle Brothers‘ combat is fantastic, I can talk about it for days and I probably shouldn’t because it’s just one part of what makes the game fantastic. The worlds are procedural. Split between their dozen-or-so towns is several noble families who can actually, as one of the mid-game scenarios, go to war with each other. You have reputations with those noble families, but also with the independent towns, and those reputations control prices, recruit availabilities and more. Oh, and those towns can develop… and the missions that you take are related to what’s going on in the world. So, if a town is being raided then you’ll have a mission to stop it, and if barbarian camps are starting to form then you’ll be asked to go and deal with that. If you have a favourite town then you’ll probably protect the caravans which travel to it and help it prosper.

Anyway, it’s a great game. I highly recommend the PC version, where it feels incredibly natural and — as with most strategy games — benefits from the flexibility, responsive and more natural feel of mouse controls. However, consoles don’t have mouse controls, and with that comes a few wrinkles in the nigh-perfect ointment of Battle Brothers.

Ports and adaptions are a wild thing, and that’s because there are a bunch of different companies and services you can hire to bring your game over onto other platforms; you can pay for a whole, massive, code-level port, or you can bring in that third party to get things working and lightly optimised. Many years ago people wouldn’t even port games onto console from PC, they’d develop them for console, or even — in the case of instances like Civilization Revolution — design a game specifically for console audiences. Strategy games are also notoriously hard to translate because of the reliance on mouse input… it’s not something that can be translated directly onto analogue sticks through intent, like shooters. Anyway, what I’m saying is that Battle Brothers on home consoles is well optimised, but not well adapted for controls, and I want to spend a while talking about that, because some smart decisions have been made, and it’s definitely a more-than bearable port.

Things started off badly for me when, directly after the developer logos, the screen was taken over with a ‘Press A to Continue’ prompt, rather than a simple visual indicator or even simply saying ‘Press A’. I won’t lie, that had me a bit jarred, and sensitive. All of the PC aids and UI elements are included, with extra UI for keyboard shortcuts. These are a little bit obnoxious and oversized while on the screen, but can handily be turned off with a click of the left-stick… this is actually a bit of an improvement over the PC version where sometimes the tooltips instantly fire for me, which can frustrate by blocking parts of the screen.

Perhaps my biggest issue was that there was no incremental speed-up while moving the cursor around the screen. As it stands, most strategy games designed for consoles have it so that there are button shortcuts for snapping between UI elements or buttons, rather than requiring the players to move a cursor. Other design elements added to strategy games for console include making things like days worth of food, something you can view in a pop-up, instantly readable by having it display on-screen at all times, as it’s much more understandable than simply having the number of food units.

And perhaps what’s most frustrating about these user experience elements being absent is that there’s really great implementation of controller input in most of the menus; things like quick-sell and quick-equip are in, and when you move through options in most screens (although not towns, for some reason) they’re made to be entirely controlled on the controller. There’s even a confirm-style, details pop-up for when you’re picking perks. It makes you wonder why there isn’t a ‘snap to party’ or ‘snap to objective’ button while on the world map, or a button to snap to the attacks menu or snap to current unit while in combat.

This isn’t to say that it’s not a phenomenal port. On a performance level, Battle Brothers, runs perfectly on console. Simply put, I’ve had zero performance issues. Maybe I was hoping for too much when I was thinking about optimisation for it when it came to console, but I know that there are a lot of people out there who want more solid strategy games on console, and Battle Brothers is one of the best, I just wish it was made a little bit more accessible for those who want to give it a shot. I know that if those people persevere then they’ll find a great game, I just wish they didn’t need to persevere on quite so many fronts.

Battle Brothers is available now on PC, Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo Switch.