Battle Suit Aces

Genre: Turn-Based Card RPG

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: This review has been directly sponsored by a kind donation from Jamie and His Cats. Thanks again for your generous contribution!)

Battle Suit Aces is a Turn-Based Card RPG released in 2025 on PC, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch. This game takes place in a future where mankind has colonized the galaxy, but finds themselves under threat from monsters called frenzied. They fend these monsters off with mech suits, but things aren’t looking so good until the heroes stumble upon a suit created by an extinct alien race with capabilities unlike those they’ve seen before. Now, one of these heroes, Captain Heathcliff, leads an expedition on the USS Zephyr to try to find more such suits, and learn about the frenzied in hopes of finding a way to stop them.

While Card RPG games typically just use the plot as a means to an end, that end being the card battles themselves, here it actually does seem like something that had thought and effort put into it, with wonderful, memorable characters and good writing as the group travels through the galaxy to seek allies and learn more about their enemy and their new weapon against said enemy. Captain Heathcliff himself is particularly well-written and well-voiced, though all of the other characters are similarly well-made, and even characters who could have easily been one-note are capable of showing hidden depths.

I was genuinely surprised by how well this game weaved its story into its gameplay, not only making you care about its cast of characters, but also really wonder about the mysteries it presents you, both in the overarching story and in the episodic snippets you get whenever you get to a new planet and need to contend with that planet’s problem or challenge.

The rest of the presentation here is good too. This game makes use of some really excellent, detailed, and colorful 2D artwork in an anime style, backed by orchestral and instrumental themes with a bit of synthesized music and jazz, which all seem like they come out of a classic anime film. Some examples include Battle Suit Aces (Main Theme), Peaceful Times, Pholians, Space Station, USS Zephyr, You’re Not Alone, Quiet on the Ship, Bounty Board, Patchworks, Our Precious Days Together, and the moving vocal ending theme, Burning Memory (that reminds me strongly of the Xenogears soundtrack).

Like many Card RPGs, this game has players putting cards down (either using standard gamepad controls or the touchscreen) as troops to defend themselves, with the troops in this case being mechs and unmanned drones, while the enemy is represented either by various alien monsters or by opposing enemy mechs and ships. Combat is won or lost either when one side expends all their cards and has no remaining units left in battle, or when the health of the mothership/spawner alien/whatever that those ships are protecting is whittled down to zero.

There are a few interesting quirks here that help to set this game apart. There’s no “casting cost” associated with any card, and you could, if you draw it, bring out your strongest unit on the first turn. However, there is a cost associated with attacking with a unit, with more powerful units tending to cost more to utilize. Your units also act as the energy you draw from, with each unit contributing to a combined energy pool at the beginning of each turn, with unspent energy carrying over to the next turn.

As you might imagine, this makes for an interesting gameplay mechanic that forces you to consider whether to use a less-powerful attack now or a more powerful one later, whether to bring out a weaker unit now to help power a stronger one, or take advantage of other bonuses the stronger unit has. What’s more, since your max energy of each color-coded energy type is finite, you have to be careful about considering whether to diversify your deck’s colors and make it less likely that you’ll be able to fuel your stronger units quickly, or whether to go with fewer colors and waste energy once you hit the energy cap on those colors.

In addition to this, there are some really clever abilities that give you various ways to synergize. For example, if you have a unit that grants shields to others, perhaps you’ll want to set it up with another unit that gains bonuses once shields are expended so you can supercharge it… or maybe you’ll pair it with a unit that grows increasingly stronger enemy-damaging spikes every time it is hit with an attack.

There’s also the way the game sets up the five open slots you can deploy attackers into as lanes, making their location relative to the enemy a strong consideration, especially when some slots attack multiple enemies, or perhaps you’ll find an enemy that changes position when you attack it. You get the ability to move one of your attackers or swap positions of two of them, and depending on who they’re facing this single move can be absolutely pivotal, or perhaps you’ll want to use the move so you can hammer the same enemy twice, or take advantage in the hole in the enemies’ defenses to hammer at their mothership or spawner alien.

There’s more too. As you progress, you’ll gain an increasing ability to modify everything – the mechs, the drones, and even the ship itself. Each of the five slots you deploy to can be equipped with its own enhancements or bonuses, and further adding abilities to your units can give you even more ability to find that perfect synergy.

When it comes to complaints, I have a few. First, it takes a while to get a good understanding of everything that’s going on and how it’s all working. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this game’s mechanics are highly-complex, but this definitely isn’t a Card RPG for newbies, and there are a lot of elements to consider when there are a full ten cards on-screen, each with multiple abilities and status effects.

The second problem ties into the first – this game is not great about how it conveys information to the player, and you’ll often find yourself having to go to each card one-by-one to inspect it for what it does, and even then it’s extremely easy to miss something. Multiple times I lost fighters in combat because they had a status effect I didn’t see, or an enemy had an ability I didn’t notice.

Also, I feel like this game is really dropping the ball on a great opportunity in that it lacks any sort of multiplayer, as I think this gameplay system would be an excellent way to challenge other players. Ah well, I suppose that’s just room to improve in a sequel.

However, overall I was absolutely delighted with Battle Suit Aces. This game combines truly excellent Card RPG combat with a gripping story full of great characters with excellent art, strong voice acting, and a solid soundtrack. It might not be great about conveying information, and it’s not a good game for folks who are new to the genre, but if you already enjoy Card RPG games, consider this a must-have.

tl;dr – Battle Suit Aces is a Turn-Based Card RPG where players deploy mechs and drones to fend off enemies in space. This game has a surprisingly compelling story and characters, with a great presentation and excellent voice acting. It also delivers with some well-crafted and deep gameplay with lots of customizability. This game could be better about presenting info to the player, and it might be tough for a newbie, but fans of Card RPGs will absolutely want to give this one a look.

Grade: A-

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