Titanium Punk OrphansTurn-Based Mecha Artillery

Game overview

Titanium Punk Orphans is a turn-based artillery game in the tradition of Worms: destructible terrain, a ridiculous arsenal, and one shot at a time. The worms are punk kids in scrap mecha, and they can't be killed.

An alien empire wiped out the grown-ups. The kids survived, found their parents' military hardware, read every manual, welded three bazookas together, and went on the offensive. Their enemy is huge, heavily armed, and run on fear and corruption so badly that nothing works properly.

Under the cartoon is a different structure from Worms. Battles are mostly assaults on fortified positions rather than duels between equal teams. Mecha hop instead of crawl, three actions a turn. Damage builds up knockback, as in Super Smash Bros., until a machine flies off the map. And the squad is persistent, as in XCOM, with kids who get tired, hurt, older and better.

Controls and interface

It plays mostly with the mouse. On your turn you have three actions with one mecha: hop, shoot, use an ability, in any order and any mix. Valid landing spots light up when you hop, the way Advance Wars shows where a unit can move, with the arc drawn so you know exactly where you'll come down.

The weapon and ability menus are big grids in the spirit of Worms 2 at its peak: every option on one screen, with what each one does to mecha and to terrain shown before you pick it.

Game layers

1. 01 · Moment-to-moment

   Hop, aim, boom

   

   Look at the battlefield. Pick a mecha and spend three actions: hop up to a ledge, lob a cluster bomb into the turret nest, hop back behind the rock. Watch the terrain cave in and an enemy mech tumble down the slope. Then it's their turn, and they try the same on you.

2. 02 · Low metagame

   Liberating a region

   

   A campaign frees one region from the Hegemony: a generated map of occupied towns, turret lines, bunkerships and fortresses, each a battle. Weapons picked up in one battle can be used in the next, the hurt kids sit one out, and the region falls when its last stronghold does.

3. 03 · High metagame

   Taking the world back, then space

   

   Beyond the region is the rest of the world, and beyond the world, the Hegemony's other conquests and the space monsters that roam between them. The Orphans keep going, planet after planet, into zero gravity and out among the stars.

   Home is the workshop, and its wall is the record: every region freed gets tagged on it in spray paint, next to the names of the kids who grew up and retired, and the legends who fell.

4. 04 · Practical game flow

   A battle at a time

   

   There are no timers on turns, so the pace is XCOM's or Advance Wars', but snappier, because only one mecha moves at a time. A battle takes twenty to forty minutes, and saves between turns. A region is a few evenings.

Game modes

There's one mode: the rebellion. Most battles are assaults on Hegemony positions, and some are straight mecha-against-mecha brawls in the old Worms style. It nests:

Features and mechanics

1. The heart of it

   Knockback, not hit points

   Mecha don't crash and burn when their health runs out. As in Super Smash Bros., every hit makes a machine more vulnerable to knockback: a fresh mecha shrugs off a blast with a stagger, a battered one is sent flying across the map by the same blast. A machine is out of the battle when it's knocked off the edge of the map or into lava or acid, yelling all the way.

   Its pilot is fine: a teleport tether snaps them back to safety the moment the mecha goes, as in Cryptark. It makes every hit matter, because every hit moves something, and it turns the terrain into part of every attack. A mecha can anchor itself to the ground against being knocked around, at the cost of being a sitting target.

   

2. Instead of the crawl

   Three actions a turn

   Worms' worms crawl and jump on a timer. Here, borrowed from Reactorcore's Epic Toy Cool Combat rules, a mecha gets three actions and spends them however it likes:

   Turn	What it's for
   Hop, shoot, hop	Pop out of cover, fire, duck back
   Shoot, shoot, shoot	Stand and unload on something that matters
   Hop, hop, hop	Cross the map, or get out of trouble
   Ability, hop, shoot	Set up overwatch or a shield first, then act

   A hop can be split into three short hops for fine footwork, or turned into a braking slide. Mid-hop, a ninja rope, parachute or bungee can be fired for free, so a single hop can swing, glide or rebound across wrecked terrain. Some mecha can also hover and stay airborne until something concussive knocks them down.

3. The ground fights back

   Terrain in layers

   The terrain is a destructible bitmap, as in Worms, but not all of it is the same, as in Clonk:

   Material	What it takes
   Dirt	Anything blows a hole in it
   Rock	Only explosives shatter it
   Granite	Two explosive hits
   Obsidian	Three explosive hits

   Broken ground drops chunks that roll downhill and tumble with the blasts. Mines and fuel barrels lie around, some targets are buried and have to be dug out as in Cortex Command, and water is no longer an instant death: mecha float. Lava and acid are another matter.

4. Not a fair fight, on purpose

   Fortresses to crack

   

   Most battles are a small squad against a fortified position: turret emplacements, bunkers, a grounded battleship bristling with guns, and Forts-style fortresses with armor, weak points, facilities and a reactor waiting to go up.

   The enemy gets three actions a turn too, spent on one of its units or on one turret network: a sector's linked turrets count as a single unit and fire together. A big base has several networks, each its own unit. Knock out a network's control and its whole sector goes quiet.

   The Hegemony's equipment is as rotten as its command. Its designs have weak points nobody bothered to fix, and its guns don't always do what they should. Find the flaw and use it.

5. Welded, taped, glorious

   A punk arsenal

   

   The weapons are Worms-crazy but grounded in military hardware, then punked up: multiple bazookas welded into one launcher, twenty shotguns taped into a bundle, cluster munitions, dirt bombs, airstrikes, homing missiles, a remote-steered hopping charge, a falling concrete slab, and super weapons at the top. Front Mission's wanzer arms and Lost Planet's mech weapons, multiplied.

   Some weapons belong to a particular mecha; the rest live in a shared war chest any mecha can draw from. And the chest keeps changing, in the spirit of Reactorcore's supercores: weapons are found on the battlefield, taken along from the workshop, or captured from the enemy, and old ones run out of uses or break. Utility tools, like the blowtorch, drill and girder, sit alongside them.

6. As big as the weapon menu

   Abilities

   Beside the weapon grid is an ability grid of the same size, with XCOM-style options: overwatch, hunker down, double move, shields, toggled passives. Some have limited uses, some cool down, some switch on and off. Some belong to one mecha, others apply to the whole squad.

   Enemy officers carry abilities too, inside cores in their machines. Take one intact, and it's yours.

7. A found family

   The squad grows up

   

   The Orphans are a persistent roster, as in XCOM and its police spinoff Chimera Squad: a rotating gang of pilots, each with their own mecha class (heavy, light, and everything between), who join, get promoted, get worn out and get hurt. A pilot whose mecha was knocked out ends up bruised in the infirmary for a battle or two; one who's run out of steam needs rest.

   Nobody dies, so losing a battle is a setback, never a funeral. But time passes, and kids grow up. At eighteen each one chooses: retire into the workshop, the supply runs or the classroom, or become a legend pilot, better than any kid and mortal. Legends who fall go on the wall, and their names stay there.

8. What you can't see

   Fog, smoke and tunnels

   Each mecha reveals everything in a radius around it and sees along its line of sight beyond that, so the map is hidden in two ways: what's out of sight, and what's out of reach. Smoke and fog block the long view but clear close in.

   Underground targets, buried bunkers and tunnels give the drill and the dirt bomb a job, and give the enemy places to hide.

9. Up to four sides

   Brawls, mosh pits and monsters

   

   A battle can have up to four sides: the Orphans and up to three enemy factions, who fight each other as happily as they fight you. Besides the Hegemony there are the space monsters, each its own faction with its own units, structures and terrain: bug swarms, hive growths, rogue robots, mutants, zombies and cyborg skeletons. A faction can even split into rival copies of itself, recolored, like two players picking the same fighter in Smash Bros.

   Sides start facing each other across the map, or are dropped in pods all over it, mosh-pit style, the way classic Worms scatters its teams. Theme packs reskin the battlefields with new textures, parallax backdrops and lighting, and some battles leave the ground entirely, in zero gravity.