Grit and Valor - 1949 review

Some of my favourite moments in roguelikes (and -lites, which we’ll get into) are when I beat the odds and clawed my way to victory on my very first run. Grit and Valor - 1949 didn’t give me the opportunity. It wanted me to die first, and it tied one of my hands behind my back to get its wish.

No matter how good I am at its twitchy but thankfully-pausable real-time tactical combat, there’s no way I’m winning with only two factory-fresh mechs when the base squad size is meant to be three. But to get a full squad, I had to fight, grind and unlock the privilege of not being doomed.

This isn’t to say that Grit and Valor is a drag. Combat is snappy and engaging, a full run ends in under an hour, and the boss fights are multi-phase slobberknockers with plenty of telegraphed attacks to dodge around. It’s satisfying to watch my squad composition come together and wipe out entire waves of fascists with almost no damage taken in return. Even the act of ticking off a dozen completed progression objectives and using the points accrued to buy permanent unlocks is gratifying thanks to punchy audio and animations accompanying every unlock click.

But between battles, it’s hard to shake the sense that my progression comes more from my sunk time than in learning the nuances of combat. Every new pile of points poured into boosting a pilot’s special ability, or fresh set of parts slapped onto a mech provides a significant, tangible and permanent upgrade to survivability.

The ‘lite brigade

Grit and Valor falls at the progression-focused extreme of the roguelike/roguelite scale. While the perks and boosts you get over the course of a run are unpredictable, the base stats of your mechs can grow massively over time, skewing the game away from its otherwise archetypical modern ‘pick one of three upgrades’ roguelike design. You lead a trio of mechs (plus a fragile command vehicle that ends the run if it falls) in pausable real-time battles across tiny grids, with simple rock-paper-scissors combat rules that keep the pace high.

Each map, waves of enemies drop in from random directions and make a beeline to the closest available target. As the intelligent half of the combat, you’ve got to scramble your units to defensive (walled or high) positions so you can hit as many targets as possible while reducing damage taken, ideally while squeezing in optional objectives for cash or unlock resources. Like RTS micromanagement boiled down to its foundations, it's simple, satisfying and demanding constant attention.

Those expecting Into The Breach style dynamism will be disappointed, as the combat here feels more like an RTS ‘comp-stomp’ or horde mode. Units can only attack when standing still, and opportunities to repair are infrequent. Each pilot (assigned independently of their customizable rides) has a limited number of special ability charges, so every run hinges on making your resources last until you can challenge the region’s boss and return to restock and cash in your long-term progression currency.

It only takes maybe 15 seconds for a unit to cross the entire map, but that’s also enough time for your entire squad to get wiped out. The fact that your supply plane often drops vital perk crates (letting you reroll your way to a satisfying assortment of temporary upgrades) in dangerous locations makes for some tough decisions, to the point of sometimes denying you a good choice and making you settle for the least-bad move—a little more luck needed than skill, perhaps.

Vive la resistance

While that roll of the dice isn’t especially compelling, one area where I can offer unqualified praise is the aesthetics. The mildly sanitized comic book take on World War 2 (the Axis armies being led by a mad scientist named Doctor Z) features plenty of chunky dieselpunk mech designs, along with consistently colorful pilots with sparse but multinational voice acting. Nice to see Polish, Scottish and French pilots getting as much time to sound off as American and English.

It’s an impressive package on every level, visually. The hand-drawn art for the UI and menus expands gracefully even into ultrawide resolutions without stretching or cropping. While the 3D models aren’t hugely detailed (probably a relief to Steam Deck players), every vehicle and mech design is clear and recognizable at a glance on the battlefield, and the animations are great too. I especially liked how my damaged mechs would become increasingly jittery, threatening to tear themselves apart before enemy fire could finish the job.

The only real technical issue I ran into was pathfinding when multiple units try to pass through the same location. Running solo, my mechs never had trouble getting from A to B across the simple grid-based battlefields, but when two units try to move through the same location they can get caught on each other and dance around awkwardly—a potentially fatal maneuver when focus fire can melt a mech in seconds, and your units can only retaliate while stationary.

Worse still, when trying to move units out of the way of incoming (and thankfully telegraphed) bombing runs and heavy boss attacks, they’d sometimes decide to sit in the angry red tile which is about to take an enormous amount of damage. Rare, but after a couple instances I made sure to pause and micromanage during those particularly intense moments, and it definitely tripped up a run or two.

But that one mechanical shortfall had a much smaller impact than just investing more time into the game. Where my first run through the British campaign map (the first of four, each escalating in difficulty and complexity as you fight your way to New Germany) was blatantly unwinnable, return trips now provide a quick and easy way to grind out resources.

It’s at once satisfying to see my mech’s stats doubled or tripled, and frustrating to know I never had a chance previously. That pursuit of power is going to be like catnip for some, watching as previously unbeatable challenges crumble, but I'd have been more smitten with Grit and Valor if it rewarded tactics over tenacity.