Into the Breach
Into the Breach! The remnants of human civilization are threatened by gigantic creatures breeding beneath the earth. You must control powerful mechs from the future to hold off this alien threat. Each attempt to save the world presents a new randomly generated challenge in this turn-based strategy game from the makers of FTL.
Key Features:
- Defend the Cities: Civilian buildings power your mechs. Defend them from the Vek and watch your fire!
- Perfect Your Strategy: All enemy attacks are telegraphed in minimalistic, turn-based combat. Analyze your opponent’s attack and come up with the perfect counter every turn.
- Build the Ultimate Mech: Find powerful new weapons and unique pilots as you battle the Vek infestation across Corporate-Nation islands.
- Another Chance: Failure is not an option. When you are defeated, send help back through time to save another timeline!
In combat, the player controls three different mechs against the Vek, and will be given an objective for that map along with a fixed number of turns to complete that objective. The principal goal for any map is to protect civilian structures which support the power grid that supports the mechs, but additional objectives may be presented. Should a civilian structure be damaged or destroyed, the power grid is weakened. On each turn, Vek forces will move across the board and attack. The player is shown the direction of the Vek unit’s intended attack and information on the number of moves the Vek unit is able to take and its remaining health are available on screen. The appearance of new Vek follows each turn. This gives the player the ability to then move each mech and fire one of its weapons as to either defeat the Vek unit, push the Vek off a line of attack, avoid an attack, intercept newly spawning Vek or an attack on civilian structures. Mechs can only take a limited amount of damage during battle before becoming inoperable, though a player can have a mech idle a turn to repair some damage; battle damage is otherwise completely repaired between maps. Pilots of mechs that defeat a Vek gain experience points, which can be used to unlock new skills. The gameplay of Into the Breach has been compared to that of chess, as it is less about overpowering the opposing forces and instead about maintaining position control and sacrificing units to gain a larger advantage
Into the Breach Review
On one of Into The Breach’s semi-roguelike runs (meaning there’s no saving and reloading if something goes wrong) every choice you make feels important, especially after you’ve played a bit and unlocked some new starting options. Each squad of three mechs has a unique set of abilities: you begin with the straightforward Rift Walkers, who have a simple melee bot with a damaging knockback punch, a tank with a damaging knockback shot, and an artillery unit that damages a tile and knocks back all adjacent tiles. But then you can unlock the Blitzkrieg, who have a Lightning Mech with an electrified whip that hits everything adjacent to its target in an unlimited chain of damage, a Hook Mech that grapples enemies and moves them adjacent to it, and the Boulder Mech which launches giant rocks that deal damage, push back horizontally adjacent units, and can obstruct a tile. Or the Flame Behemoths or Frozen Titans, whose specialties you can probably guess but come with some unexpected twists that make them great to experiment with. You can even build your own squad by mixing and matching mechs from any of the ones you’ve unlocked in search of brand new strategies.
Into The Breach maintains a roguelike structure of procedurally generated trials and permadeath, but when a campaign goes south not all is lost. If a mech is destroyed during a battle, it will return in the next, only without its pilot and their unique trait. Too much collateral damage is game over but means you have the chance to send one of your living pilots–experience points and bonus traits intact–back in time to captain a new squad, in a new campaign. The game is difficult, but starting over isn’t tiresome because your actions so directly determine outcomes, and you always feel you can improve. And individual battles are so swift and satisfying that they become a craving that you’ll want to keep feeding over and over.
There is so much strategic joy in seeing the potential destruction a swarm of giant monsters is about to unleash on a city, then quickly staging and executing elaborate counter maneuvers to ruin the party. Into The Breach’s focus on foresight makes its turn-based encounters an action-packed, risk-free puzzle, and the remarkable diversity of playstyles afforded by unique units keeps each new run interesting. It’s a pleasure to see what kind of life-threatening predicaments await for you to creatively resolve in every new turn, every new battle, and every new campaign. Into The Breach is a pristine and pragmatic tactical gem with dynamic conflicts that will inspire you to jump back in again, and again, and again.
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