Banners & Bastions brings its combined reality strategy game to today’s quest with its early access release. Please read my first impression.
Banners and fortress from the questionable know exactly what it is and nails the feel of the short strategic experience. Developed by the same team that brought Airspace’s defenders and tablecraft, you can quickly feel the inspiration from those titles.
If you’ve played Airspace Defender before, the dome-shaped world concept and how to manipulate objects will quickly become familiar to very different game types. If the previous game is basically missile commands in mixed reality, Banner and Bastions house deeper depth and strategy.
Mixed reality meets the defense of the tower
Banners & Bastions will make sure you interact with the battlefield by moving the flags into army movements and positioning them around the board, or deploying units by selecting new ones and dropping them into the action, if available. You can cast spells like Fireballs. This simply grabs and drops enemy units.
Each campaign takes place across turn-based waves, allowing units and defenses to be strategically placed before the next round. You can recruit troops like archers, swordsmen, and spear airlines, and block choke points with defensive structures such as towers, walls and other barriers. As the round begins, we observe that miniature-scale battles, played in real time from a top-down perspective, either rearrange the army or use spells to intervene. It’s very satisfying to watch him destroy a small horde of enemies trying to surround my castle.
The ability to physically tilt and rotate and rearrange the battlefield is also useful for immersion and spatial awareness.
Like Airspace Defender, the entire experience is handy, so in this experience you’ll have to put your controller down again. Hand tracking requires a mix of wide gestures and small, intentional pinching to drag military forces around the world. Hand tracking is mostly well tolerated, but there are some moments that remind me of the current limitations of gesture-only input, especially when the lighting in my room is not ideal. You’ll be very interested in spinning this idea with a headset in an eye-opening pinch, like the Apple Vision Pro.
Banner and Fortress Progress
Early Access Performance and Progress
The banners and fortresses show clear progression structures, even in early access releases. Players will earn stars through successful campaigns and unlock new troops and upgrades with a wide range of specialized trees as they climb onto the global leaderboard. There are several card types already implemented, with various enemies dodging them. The pacing is well balanced and I’m not overwhelmed, at least on what I’ve played so far.
You don’t sit waiting too long, and it also doesn’t throw too much at you too quickly. However, there is plenty of challenge to keep thinking, especially as you enter the later rounds and start optimizing your military combinations and map placement. Still, it avoids overwhelming casual players. As someone who normally doesn’t attract me to this genre, I am grateful for that learning curve.
The map can be rotated and repositioned, but cannot be resized. I want to zoom in and expand the dome. Like Airspace Defender, I find myself wanting an interior view. Imagine stepping into the dome and watching the battle unfold around you, swinging your sword from a first-person perspective, or firing some arrows.
Such mechanics aren’t necessarily essential to gameplay, but they’ve seen in other games that incorporate RTS elements like Guardians Frontline, and this feels like a fun, immersive layer opportunity. Getting into the battle that embodies one of your little warriors is a great gameplay experience.
Final Round
The questionable thing is building a track record of developing complex reality games with smart designs that accept the idea that a good headset game doesn’t necessarily have to take over your entire environment. Banners & Bastions’ visuals are clean, the controls are intuitive, the gameplay is satisfying, all set within a well-structured package.
Even those who don’t normally go to strategy games, I enjoy grinding, often rethinking my placement and chasing better results every new campaign. I wasn’t intended, but I ended up playing it long enough to run out of Quest battery. So if you plan to pick this up, make sure you have an external battery for your spare at hand or a charger nearby.
Banners & Bastions is now available for early access for $9.99 on Meta Quest 2, 3, 3s and Pro.
Join Ian and Don on this week’s VR Sideload. They will talk about Banners & Bastions and discuss the latest updates for Bit Planet Games founder and studio director Christopher Stockman, Super RC, Man’s Sky No No Sky, and all the favorite Anti-Hero in DeadPool VR, and the latest updates for those coming.
