Grit and Valor - 1949 review: Roguelike rut

Grit and Valor – 1949 plays like a polished draft of a piece that's not quite ready to see daylight yet. It's a roguelike, real-time strategy game where a small band of robot rebels faces down a much larger, deadlier army of mechs, which is a fun concept in itself, and some of the map designs are excellent. However, developer Milky Tea's take on roguelike replayability focuses too much on grinding for improvement without including ways to make the process more enjoyable.

What if

Grit and Valor – 1949 is an alternate World War 2 story in a world where the Soviet Union never reached Berlin, and Nazi forces overran the United Kingdom. Everyone gets put into underground labor camps, and a small resistance force, armed with high-powered mechs, is fighting back. Glibly using "labor camps" and "World War 2" as a motif just feels downright irresponsible. It doesn't take a historian to make the connection between those concepts and actual Nazi death camps, and it's surprising that no one apparently stopped to think that maybe they aren't the best choice for setting up your robot strategy game. 

The bizarre thing is that none of this story setup actually matters. Grit and Valor's narrative is just set dressing, a bit of context for dozens of battles, and characters never matter beyond their role in giving you a new mission or unlocking upgrades. None of it is essential for what's happening in each mission, so Milky Tea could just as easily have cooked up some other plot concept without negatively affecting anything else in the game. Even just a general resistance story would've worked without requiring any major alteration for how the game plays out.

Robots in the skies

That's because Grit and Valor is about blowing up robots on tiny square battlefields, not telling war stories. Each mission has you take two mechs and a non-combatant command vehicle into battle against successive waves of enemy units. You'll sometimes have a specific point to defend or radio tower to activate, but the main objectives are surviving enemy assaults and keeping the command vehicle safe.

Map design varies depending on objectives. When Grit and Valor is at its best, it drops you in zones with multiple points to defend and levels of terrain to navigate. Even when you're playing on normal speed, there's palpable tension as you rush your units around to collect incoming drops and get in position before the next enemy wave approaches. Some of the most exciting maps are the ones with no intel available – giant, grey icons on the selection screen with no indication as to what awaits you.

More than once, these un-scouted locations included a tough, additional objective alongside the usual tasks, such as destroying missile silos before the end of an enemy wave. These, like any objective, are entirely optional. The only thing you actually have to do in each mission is survive and defend a specific point, but completing optional tasks rewards you with money or parts for upgrades. It's a smart way to let players set their own difficulty without making it too punitive if they just want the win with less complication.

Grit and Valor isn't always at its best, though. More than a few maps have just one optional objective, uninspired layouts, or both. Enemy waves typically congregate toward the map's center, well away from the defense point, and make it easy for you to pair a ranged and a ballistic unit together to deal with incoming foes. In a few noteworthy missions, I had no skill uses left and two heavily damaged units. They successfully defended against four enemy waves without using terrain advantages or doing anything but sit in the same spot and demolish everything that approached. Maybe it was just good strategy, but it felt more like weak design.

Battles hinge on a weakness triangle where ranged, ballistic, and fire mechs are strong against one mech type and weak against another, but as there's no chance to change your mechs after embarking on a campaign, much of what happens feels like it relies on luck over meticulous planning.

Combat drills

One area where pre-mission strategizing does feel important, though, is your choice of pilot. As you progress through Grit and Valor, you unlock more pilots as well as new mechs, and each pilot has a unique skill. One lets their mech jump across several tiles in a single move, which is handy for repositioning or for intercepting foes, while another can plant mines that are almost guaranteed to destroy the enemy unit that steps on it. These skills have limited uses, and since one of the only ways to replenish them involves picking up random supply drops that might have a skill charge booster as an option, the emphasis is very firmly on carefully using skills at the right time.

Those mid-battle drops happen after every enemy wave. Command flies in a package that lands somewhere on the map – usually in a spot that's inconvenient, so reaching it involves some strategic risk-taking before the next enemies drop in. These packages include three buffs, of which you can only choose one, and they're balanced impressively well. While none of the upgrades will likely change the tide of battle, they all offer something useful, such as higher critical hit chances, the opportunity to dismantle a mech if you attack it under certain circumstances, or a much-needed health boost.

The downside is that these are the only things that shake up how missions play out in Grit and Valor, and the roguelike loop relies a bit too much on losing and starting again with new, permanent upgrades. Grit and Valor gives you few opportunities to influence how a chain of missions plays out, so it often feels like you're just wasting time on a doomed venture so you can go back and eke out some slightly better stats for your favorite mech.

It's meant to feel punishing and unforgiving, but it just seems like a shallow understanding of what makes roguelikes fun and worth replaying. Even in Dead Cells, which relies on the player unlocking new powers after failure, you're unlocking abilities at a decent rate and have alternate paths to explore. The only alternate routes in Grit and Valor involve choosing between two missions with different optional objectives. This pacing issue becomes less noticeable once you finally start unlocking new mechs and can upgrade them at a more regular clip, but Grit and Valor never fully shakes off the sense that it's about grinding more than tactics.

Putting aside the weird, tone-deaf childishness of the plot setup, Grit and Valor – 1949 is occasionally an exciting little strategy game. Some of its map designs and optional objectives force you to make the most of scant resources, and for all the challenge, it's refreshingly quick and easy to make up losses when you fail. It's just frustratingly shallow in its take on roguelike structures for longer than it should be.

The publisher provided the PC copy of Grit and Valor - 1949 used for this review. Grit and Valor - 1949 is available now for Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5.

Josh Broadwell

Contributing Editor

Josh is a freelance writer and reporter who specializes in guides, reviews, and whatever else he can convince someone to commission. You may have seen him on NPR, IGN, Polygon, or VG 24/7 or on Twitter, shouting about Trails. When he isn’t working, you’ll likely find him outside with his Belgian Malinois and Australian Shepherd or curled up with an RPG of some description.