Game details Developer: Subset Games

Publisher: Subset Games

Platform: Windows (coming to Mac, Linux "after launch")

Release Date: February 27, 2018

Price: $15

Links: Steam | GOG | Humble | Official website Subset Games: Subset Games: Windows (coming to Mac, Linux "after launch")February 27, 2018: $15

My favorite games—video, board, outdoor, whatever—stand out because of the stories they inadvertently rope me into. And I don't mean pre-written ones. At their best, these games combine otherworldly, world-saving stakes with wild challenges, reasonable ways to overcome them, and a sprinkling of come-from-behind momentum shifts on either side.

I have had the unbelievable pleasure of playing Into the Breach, the newest game from the makers of 2012's indie hit FTL, for a few months. That span of time has been littered with holy-cow story moments in which I was nearly a guardian of the ga... er, universe. I have failed, again and again, to save humanity from an alien-bug scourge. I have clumsily sacrificed dozens of my own robo-suit soldiers by issuing a range of idiotic orders. And I have torn the fabric of time to rewind and try again, always feeling one step closer to mastering this galactic-scale war.

But it's not just the "I can't believe I pulled that off" factor that drives me to recommend this just-one-more-game approach to tactical combat. Into the Breach is just as charming for boiling down similar thrills found in FTL and making them work for pretty much any experience level of computer gamer.

Call it a Starship Troopers version of chess—to describe the delectable future-soldier combat and the way its approachable pieces and systems evolve into something much greater.

New ways to kill bugs











What exactly is going on in the world of Into the Breach? It's a little hard to say, owing to the way its plot is meted out in small-but-alluring ways. Key points: a race of insectoid creatures called the Vek has begun emerging from the Earth's surface. Your mission is to save as many civilians as possible by issuing orders to a three-person army of giant, mechanized robo-battlers.

The setup is mostly for the sake of flavor text and dispensed by everyone from screaming witnesses (like little kids asking why the heck all these robots are landing outside their window) to the dystopian future's corporate overlords. It's all cute and engrossing enough to cement the game's concept without getting in the way of what's essentially a turn-based tactics video game, similar to classics like Final Fantasy Tactics, Advance Wars, and XCOM. Every ITB battle begins with your troops landing on a relatively small, randomly generated battlefield. Each unit can do two things per turn: one move, one action. After your units move, the enemy follows suit. Rinse (with Vek blood) and repeat.

In other examples of the genre, battles hinge on eliminating your enemies and emerging victorious. Army A wins, army B loses. ITB's first major difference from its peers is the greater mission at play, which persists from battle to battle and from island to island: keeping the human race alive. You must protect humanity's "energy grid" by stopping the Vek from destroying major human installations in every battlefield, which are usually functionless buildings but occasionally offer perks and changes to combat. After roughly 5-7 turns, the battle ends. Any remaining Vek burrow back underground, and you head to the next randomly generated battlefield. If your grid takes any damage in one battle, that carries over to the next one.

Once your energy grid's value drops to zero, your game is over. At that point, rip a hole in the space-time continuum, begin anew, and try to vex the Veks again.

In good news, your troops regain all health between battles, and each battle comes with a series of optional objectives that can restore energy grid points, give boosts to troops, and other perks. But these "bonuses," like pretty much everything else in Into the Breach, emphasize the game's absolute lifeblood truth—the sauce by which this game lives, dies, and breathes deeply. Namely, there is no such thing as an easy decision in ITB.

Should you vex the Veks?









Take the basic combat thrust of killing big, bad bugs. Should that be your priority in a given mission? Maybe! Your troops accrue experience points for torching the things, and they make satisfying venom-gurgling noises as they wither beneath your firepower. That's always fun.

But every ITB battle takes place in a cramped, populated zone, and the game gives you a huge reason not to fake like a kaiju supermonster or a laws-be-damned cop. If your bombast causes collateral damage, it won't just inspire the rage of a commanding officer; it'll likely reduce your energy grid, as most attacks will directly or indirectly shove anything nearby 1-2 squares of movement. And you have to manage that energy grid for quite some time in a given campaign.

The game never declares these systems in a tutorial-styled way. Your first ITB sessions will crumble under the weight of hard-knocks lessons, along with organically learning how your starter units move, attack, and often get stuck. If you don't stay a few steps ahead, for example, you can easily find your distance-shooting cannon unit sandwiched by Vek. Worse, your other troops' "push" attacks—when used to free your cannon up—will actually shove a Vek into your cannon's face and possibly kill it.

Unit jostling plays out in really interesting ways throughout the game. Humans and Veks alike can walk—or be shoved—onto all kinds of weird terrain, which can do anything from immobilize to harm to weaken to kill. As mentioned earlier, the Vek burrow from underground, and every round of combat begins with new ones emerging... but a human unit can stand on a burrowing spot to block an enemy's emergence, at the cost of health. And, hey! Foes can be shoved onto those burrowing points, as well, which blocks their allies and causes damage in the process.

Once you learn those basics, you can still expect a "normal" difficulty campaign to be littered with tough choices—like when you sacrifice a unit's health to keep an optional objective alive—and random saves—like when you sacrifice a building's grid point in order to move a unit across the battlefield, only to find that the building is magically and randomly shielded from a Vek attack. (God bless the game's rare-but-blessed dice rolls.)

The more you play, the more complications and variables you can toy with. Within a given campaign, you can unlock a variety of stat boosts, along with new attacks and moves (though even these demand that you make tough decisions in terms of which units don't get boosts). Between each of your game-overs, you can spend the game's coins (earned by completing achievements throughout all of your sessions, such as pulling off specific moves with certain units) to unlock entirely new unit trio options. And while every start-from-scratch campaign is randomly generated, the game's "folds in the space-time continuum" gimmick allows you to keep one of your characters—complete with his or her accrued experience points and perks—to strengthen your next attempt at Vek domination.

Electric chain of events

Into the Breach plays at whatever speed you want, owing to its turn-based nature. Every battle also includes one free use of what I call the "whoops!" button, which lets you rewind every move and action you've taken in one round of combat. (Movement can always be undone, so that you can creep up to a potential attack point, mouse over an attack option, and see exactly which units and buildings will be impacted before committing.) This "whoops!" button is one of my favorite tweaks in ITB—because it's a sweet bit of forgiveness but also because it adds a limited currency to the concept, which makes the thing its own difficult decision!

The two-person team responsible for Into the Breach also designed the masterful FTL (Faster Than Light), and the similarities—tough decisions, random encounters, increasingly tough odds met by increasingly boosted units and powers—look parallel enough on paper. But FTL's "pause" button was never a true solution for anybody who felt stressed by how frantic the game became once action was unpaused and calamity unfolded. ITB is, at its heart, a far more accessible execution of the same delightful gameplay mechanics.

That means, even though the game's missions are randomly generated, the core loop of having to react to calamity and make tough decisions always feels fresh; never redundant, repetitive, or lacking. And this time, you can spend as long as you want before you slap a figurative egg timer and take your ITB turn.

I love the rate and diversity at which ITB doles out new unit and battling options. I love how every cool new attack possibility has clear "this could hurt me" potential that must always be accounted for (and can sometimes be lessened with experience-based unlocks). I love the vile, challenging surprises that emerge in a given battle scenario, usually met in equal measure by hard-but-possible opportunities to earn some grid points or perks back.

And all of those feed into the absolute love affair I have with the save-the-world stories that have unfolded in my sessions. The times I've sacrificed grid points and lived by the edge of my teeth to build out an ideal "electric-chain" attack squad—one that can destroy enemies touching each other and (with an upgrade) no longer harm nearby buildings in the process—and then finally manipulating Veks into a perfect zap-'em-all line to blow out a big, later-game mission.

I think about the times I've felt like I finally learned something from failures, when I opt for a less satisfying "just shove the bad guys without harming them" strategy—which gives out less XP—and then used that to save a seemingly impossible scenario on my last point of energy. And I think about the times I've intentionally targeted one of my own units to kill multiple other Veks nearby and imagined her screaming some awesomely patriotic cry, like, "FOR HUMANITY!" as she burned to death to save thousands of lives.

If clicking units around to save the world sounds like your cup of gaming tea, don't hesitate to buy Into the Breach. Don't wait for a sale. You have hours and hours and hours of this game ahead of you; why wait any longer for them?

The good:

The spirit of indie hit FTL has been successfully translated to a more patient, turn-based system.

Trial-by-fire lessons and ugh-so-close failures never feel unfair—even though the game is riddled with tough and occasionally impossible decisions.

A constant stream of possible upgrades, either during missions or between failed campaigns, keeps ITB fresh for months.

Pixelated art design works thanks to clear, SNES-era sci-fi designs and is sold by superb audio direction. (Bonus: the 2D game's sub-200MB install will work on pretty much any PC imaginable.)

An "easy" mode helps the tough-love medicine go down before you face the default (and ultimately satisfying) challenge level.

The bad:

The failures you'll face in "normal" difficulty and above are not for the faint of heart. Basically, don't play ITB on a an easy-to-throw laptop.

The ugly:

As of press time, you'll have to wait for versions on Mac and Linux. (Console support has not yet been announced.)

Verdict: If you play PC video games at all whatsoever, buy Into the Breach.