"Mechs, outer space, and giant monsters" sounds like a winning formula on the surface, but Battle Suit Aces puts a unique spin on it. Rather than offering full-scale, action-packed battles across the universe, Trinket Studios' next game instead boils things down to a sleek, card-based battle system, which focuses on resource management and strategy rather than brute force action--all while adding dozens of interesting characters with fully voiced dialogue on top of it.
After playing an hour-long demo, it's immediately clear that Trinket is on to something with this unique approach, but it's too early to tell if the experiment will stick the landing. Battle Suit Aces is trying something different, and so far, the results are worthy of your attention.
Battle Suite Aces follows a simple premise: A group of spacefarers called the Patchworks travel the universe in a massive spaceship called the USS Zephyr, as they explore planets looking for ancient tech. In their travels, they have found and commandeered a Gundam-adjacent mech suit, and eventually they meet other characters with mech suits of their own.
The crew fights against the Frenzied, mysterious monsters that can attack without notice and devastate everything in their path. The Zephyr and its crew meet the Frenzied multiple times throughout the demo, an excellent introduction to Battle Suit Aces' novel battle system.
Fights take place via a card-battling system, where each character you've recruited is represented by a card featuring their mech. There are also secondary cards--in the demo, for example, these are all attack drones--which can attack for you as needed. The USS Zephyr, meanwhile, is the "player" of these cards, but it has a set life total--if enemies attack enemy spaces on your side of the board, the Zephyr will take damage.
Battle Suit Aces uses cards to depict space battles between mechs, ships, and drones.
Speaking of the board, the battlefield is a single row containing five slots, and only one card can fit in a slot at a time. As you fill slots in the row with cards, you accrue energy in whichever color is represented on the card--the deck in the demo contains blue and red energy (the full game may have more), so you'll accrue one energy of a certain color for each card in your row. After energy is accrued, you can choose how to spend it on attacks and other abilities, and you can also move cards to different slots once per turn in order to maximize the turn's potential.
This is where the full strategic prowess of the Battle Suit Aces fighting system comes into play. Each battle is won by reducing the HP of the main enemy to zero, and you damage that enemy the same way they can damage the Zephyr--by firing a card's weapon into a slot not occupied by an enemy card. If the opponent places a card in an empty slot, damage will be taken by that card before the main enemy will, meaning that each card is "protecting" its leader when placed.
Every battle in the demo offered multiple different paths to victory, creating an engaging and sometimes stressful experience. Early battles are easy, as they're normally won by moving a powerful mech to empty slots as needed. Later on, the demo throws a couple of curveballs into the battle mechanics; one battle creates more enemy cards whenever one of their own is killed, while another places shields in each slot which need to be broken before the main enemy can be damaged.
Between missions, you can customize your deck of cards.
After a battle, you can visit different rooms on the USS Zephyr and make changes to your mechs, drones, and more in different rooms of the ship. This adds an air of customization to the experience, as it lets you throw your ideal curveballs at an enemy ship depending on your chosen loadout. I really like the way Trinket Studios has already shown it can tweak the battle system on the fly, and I'm excited to see what sort of mad scientist experiments later battles in the game will present.
Battling in Battle Suit Aces is fun, but the real joy comes from listening to the characters interact with one another. Each character is fully voiced, and unique personalities burst from each of those voices. Heathcliff is the leader of the crew and an adept engineer in his own right. Daciana is a fiery mechanic with a seedy backstory. Jules is a researcher obsessed with analyzing every last inch of ancient tech--and he drinks a lot of coffee. The dozen or so characters I met in this demo all burst with personality, and their back-and-forth banter elicited more than a few laughs. There were a few references to potential plot points in the main game too.
These characters are the emotional heart that brings the rest of Battle Suit Aces to life, and listening to their stories unfold is very cool. However, this demo is heavily unbalanced in terms of "dialogue time" versus "gaming time." There is a hefty amount of dialogue that you have to skip through, and while it's all important and worthy of your attention, it does mean it will take a while to get from one card battle to the next.
Like Battle Chef Brigade, Battle Suit Aces' biggest strengths are its gorgeous art and intriguing characters.
If you do decide to listen, there's also a ton of information being thrown at you all at once, and it may leave you wondering what the heck is happening in this game. Some of the terms are easy enough to pick up--Blue Crest is the name of the ancient mech, the Pholians are the ancient race who developed the tech, etc.--but there are some sentences that sound like complete rubbish out of context. If you're the type that likes to have all of the information all at once, you may experience an overload of that info before long, especially in the time constraints of an hour-long demo.
Battle Suit Aces smashes a bunch of different elements together--mech suits, spaceships, card battles, upgrade systems, dialogue trees, and more--into an interesting package. Card battles are fun and engaging, especially when extra wrinkles are thrown in to challenge you in new ways. The crew of the Zephyr are shaping up to be the emotional weight of the story, with a few interesting details already spilling out in this short demo playthrough.
This demo only offered a limited amount of time with Trinket Studios' latest, but despite the brevity, I'm hopeful that the full experience will come up aces.
The demo for Battle Suit Aces is available now on Steam.
Source
After playing an hour-long demo, it's immediately clear that Trinket is on to something with this unique approach, but it's too early to tell if the experiment will stick the landing. Battle Suit Aces is trying something different, and so far, the results are worthy of your attention.
Aces high
Battle Suite Aces follows a simple premise: A group of spacefarers called the Patchworks travel the universe in a massive spaceship called the USS Zephyr, as they explore planets looking for ancient tech. In their travels, they have found and commandeered a Gundam-adjacent mech suit, and eventually they meet other characters with mech suits of their own.
The crew fights against the Frenzied, mysterious monsters that can attack without notice and devastate everything in their path. The Zephyr and its crew meet the Frenzied multiple times throughout the demo, an excellent introduction to Battle Suit Aces' novel battle system.
Fights take place via a card-battling system, where each character you've recruited is represented by a card featuring their mech. There are also secondary cards--in the demo, for example, these are all attack drones--which can attack for you as needed. The USS Zephyr, meanwhile, is the "player" of these cards, but it has a set life total--if enemies attack enemy spaces on your side of the board, the Zephyr will take damage.
Battle Suit Aces uses cards to depict space battles between mechs, ships, and drones.
Speaking of the board, the battlefield is a single row containing five slots, and only one card can fit in a slot at a time. As you fill slots in the row with cards, you accrue energy in whichever color is represented on the card--the deck in the demo contains blue and red energy (the full game may have more), so you'll accrue one energy of a certain color for each card in your row. After energy is accrued, you can choose how to spend it on attacks and other abilities, and you can also move cards to different slots once per turn in order to maximize the turn's potential.
This is where the full strategic prowess of the Battle Suit Aces fighting system comes into play. Each battle is won by reducing the HP of the main enemy to zero, and you damage that enemy the same way they can damage the Zephyr--by firing a card's weapon into a slot not occupied by an enemy card. If the opponent places a card in an empty slot, damage will be taken by that card before the main enemy will, meaning that each card is "protecting" its leader when placed.
Every battle in the demo offered multiple different paths to victory, creating an engaging and sometimes stressful experience. Early battles are easy, as they're normally won by moving a powerful mech to empty slots as needed. Later on, the demo throws a couple of curveballs into the battle mechanics; one battle creates more enemy cards whenever one of their own is killed, while another places shields in each slot which need to be broken before the main enemy can be damaged.
Between missions, you can customize your deck of cards.
After a battle, you can visit different rooms on the USS Zephyr and make changes to your mechs, drones, and more in different rooms of the ship. This adds an air of customization to the experience, as it lets you throw your ideal curveballs at an enemy ship depending on your chosen loadout. I really like the way Trinket Studios has already shown it can tweak the battle system on the fly, and I'm excited to see what sort of mad scientist experiments later battles in the game will present.
The heart of the cards
Battling in Battle Suit Aces is fun, but the real joy comes from listening to the characters interact with one another. Each character is fully voiced, and unique personalities burst from each of those voices. Heathcliff is the leader of the crew and an adept engineer in his own right. Daciana is a fiery mechanic with a seedy backstory. Jules is a researcher obsessed with analyzing every last inch of ancient tech--and he drinks a lot of coffee. The dozen or so characters I met in this demo all burst with personality, and their back-and-forth banter elicited more than a few laughs. There were a few references to potential plot points in the main game too.
These characters are the emotional heart that brings the rest of Battle Suit Aces to life, and listening to their stories unfold is very cool. However, this demo is heavily unbalanced in terms of "dialogue time" versus "gaming time." There is a hefty amount of dialogue that you have to skip through, and while it's all important and worthy of your attention, it does mean it will take a while to get from one card battle to the next.
Like Battle Chef Brigade, Battle Suit Aces' biggest strengths are its gorgeous art and intriguing characters.
If you do decide to listen, there's also a ton of information being thrown at you all at once, and it may leave you wondering what the heck is happening in this game. Some of the terms are easy enough to pick up--Blue Crest is the name of the ancient mech, the Pholians are the ancient race who developed the tech, etc.--but there are some sentences that sound like complete rubbish out of context. If you're the type that likes to have all of the information all at once, you may experience an overload of that info before long, especially in the time constraints of an hour-long demo.
Battle Suit Aces smashes a bunch of different elements together--mech suits, spaceships, card battles, upgrade systems, dialogue trees, and more--into an interesting package. Card battles are fun and engaging, especially when extra wrinkles are thrown in to challenge you in new ways. The crew of the Zephyr are shaping up to be the emotional weight of the story, with a few interesting details already spilling out in this short demo playthrough.
This demo only offered a limited amount of time with Trinket Studios' latest, but despite the brevity, I'm hopeful that the full experience will come up aces.
The demo for Battle Suit Aces is available now on Steam.
Source