I’ve had my eye onGrit & Valor: 1949over the past few months leading up to its launch. I’m always up for a good tactical roguelike, and the game’s promise of dieselpunk mech combat was an enticing one. Now it’s out, I’m delighted to discover that Grit & Valor holds its own, and more than enough to stand out among its competitors.
Into The Breach Meets Wolfenstein
As its title suggests, Grit & Valor takes place in 1949, in a timeline where the Axis Powers’ development of combat mechs have allowed them to conquer all of Europe following the events of World War 2. All that’s left of the Allied forces are the Resistance, operating out of a secret base off the coast of Scotland.
Using stolen and repurposed enemy mechs, your mission as a Resistance commander is to lead a squadron into enemy territory and deploy an EMP, disrupting mech production and communications, in a last-ditch effort to turn the tide. It’s standard roguelike fare, but it works.
There aren’t any historical characters in Grit & Valor; its sci-fi World War 2 is entirely fictionalized, from the pilots and officers who are around to help you in your fight to the cackling, cartoonish commanders you face in each region you liberate. Rather than a certain failed artist turned dictator, the Axis’ evil empire is led by a mysterious, shadowy figure called Doctor Z.
Aiding him are archetypal antagonists with names straight out of a Four Color comic book of the period, like Helene von Sturm and General Harmsworth. The whole thing has a fun, pulpy feel, and the renderings of the mechs, characters, and environments all do a wonderful job of bringing the game’s smog-choked, occupied Europe to life.
We Shall Fight Them On The Beaches
The core gameplay loop isn’t anything revolutionary. You make your way along a node map, mostly through combat encounters but occasionally finding a shop or a randomized hidden event, until you defeat the boss or your squad is wiped out. Back at the base, you spend the resources earned on the last run to buy improvements for the next one. Rinse and repeat.
Where Grit & Valor stands out is in the combat system itself, which blends genres in a fun, engaging way and manages to stay challenging but never oppressive. Battles are fought on a grid map, usually the territory of turn-based games, but Grit & Valor is real-time with pause; gameplay is about reacting to constantly-shifting battlefield conditions to keep your mechs in fighting shape while completing objectives and holding off waves of enemies from all sides.
Mechs can’t move and shoot at the same time, so you need to find a place where they can settle in and open fire, without taking too much damage. At the same time,enemy bombers will do everything they can to force you out of your entrenched positions, you need to shuffle your formations to account for strengths and weaknesses (flamethrowers beat bombs, bombs beat bullets, bullets beat flamethrowers), all while running around to collect supply drops, deliver cargo, or sabotage enemy supplies. There’s never a dull moment once battle starts.
While you can pause any time to make decisions, the game is also kind enough to slow time while you have a mech selected. Not everyone has an esports-level APM.
The end result is a tactical challenge that blends XCOM-style use of cover, high ground, and positioning with tower defense, although in this case the towers are mobile mechs that you can reposition at will. The limited squad size and customization options evoke Into The Breach, especially since assigning a different pilot to a mech but otherwise leaving your squad the same can drastically change your strategy.
Wunderwaffen
Customization is the heart and soul of mecha games, and while Grit & Valor doesn’t bog you down with the minutiae of tonnage, ammo counts, and fuel mixes, it offers more than enough options for devising your perfect build through a relatively simple module system. Each mech gets one slot for equipment in its cockpit, weapon systems, legs, engine, and plating, each of which will affect its stats.
If you want a machine-gun mech that has a high crit rate to chew through enemies, you’re able to make it. If you’d rather have the same mech be speedy enough to get to high ground and earn a damage buff for doing so, you can do that, too. It takes a long time to get enough parts to really tinker with builds, but once you do the possibilities are vast.
At the same time, you can swap out pilots at the beginning of a run; a mech’s pilot doesn’t affect its stats, but offers an active ability that you can use a few times throughout every campaign. Deploying mine fields or calling in air strikes are on the table, or you could pick pilots that customize their ride with jump jets or self-repair systems.
Grit & Valor is, in many ways, exactly what I look for in a roguelike - individual runs aren’t too long, so it’s easy to squeeze in a game or two when time is tight, but there’s plenty of incentive for multi-run marathons as well. Between the compelling combat and the excellent visuals, I can see this being a mainstay of my late-night gaming sessions for the foreseeable future.
