ITB is the difficult second album from Subset Games, creators of the highly regarded space combat simulator Faster Than Light.



Into the breach is practically the opposite of FTL, at least in the narrow terms of strategy games. Whereas FTL relies heavily on min/maxing and probabilities, one of ITB’s most original mechanics is just how rigid and precise the combat is. Each turn sees the alien Vek telegraph their exact intentions to the player, and so your turn is all about manipulating the board in your favour, and then only once your turn is over does the enemy commence their attack.

Your first instinct is to eliminate as many Vek as possible, but it quickly becomes apparent than most mechs lack the ability to simply kill whatever is put in front of them. Each turn is a complicated process of positional tweaks and tests, until you eventually find the best possible permutation and execute it accordingly.



Perhaps you knock the flying over one square so that the other beetle Vek dude will attack this one and kill it, but then that leaves this other city exposed so maybe you can use your big mech to block that attack. Or wait maybe you can just launch that guy into the water so then YES your fat mech dude has a clear path to bash this guy into the mountain. WAIT shit NO, because that will set the forest on fire and burn our other mech…

There is a simple and elegant beauty to this system, and equally an astounding depth that only becomes apparent once you’ve played the game a few times through. But the most important point should not be understated; it’s really satisfying to play.

Often, after extensive revisions, you come across some revelatory solution that makes you feel like a goddamn genius strategist. It is in these sated moments, when you are patting yourself on the back, admiring how much of a prodigious intellect you truly are, that you take another step back and marvel at how many more revisions and how much more intelligence the developers have devoted to creating such a rewarding and intricately balanced system.

Even when you stomp through an easy level where everything just falls into place, there is something logically therapeutic about it. It’s like, imagine if sudoku was fun. ITB more often feels like a puzzle game than a strategy.

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The most important weapon at your disposal in Into the Breach is knowledge. From the very first turn you play, ITB conveys everything you need to understand screen dynamically and precisely. As good UI usually does, the work here can easily go completely unnoticed, even when the devs have said that something like half of the development the time was spent working on it. As strong as the combat in the game is, it’s success hinges absolutely on the stellar interface.

But dang if that Advance Wars/Final Fantasy Tactics art style doesn’t wet my whistle! Considering that there are actually only a limited number of maps across the 5 small islands, you might be within your rights to have wanted a little more detailing on each map. But every bit of detail gained is probably a bit of clarity lost.

The mechs are kind of cutesy signifiers or tokens on a board, a functional chibi placeholder for the real, badass mech you’re supposed to be imagining (although honestly, I prefer the chibi). Even so, the animations of the mechs attacking or dropping into battle, imbue them with a stout sense of weight and bulk.

In some regards, the narrative is pretty superfluous to the gameplay. The multiple timeline mechanic (following one of your three pilot’s back in time, restarting the battle with an experienced pilot), adds a bit of flavour and continuity, but isn’t that integral to the game. In other cases, there are some great valences between story and the system. Having the cities you protect double as your power grid/health bar gives you extra incentive to care about the inhabitants. You have to weigh up every action, and unlike the movies, you can’t just suplex monsters into skyscrapers without circumstance. (15.00) Along with the small flourishes of text the cities cheer you on with, it’s a sleek touch that grounds the gameplay. It adds a level of jeopardy to the puzzles that you won’t feel for the tetrominos in Tetris or the panels in Threes!

We haven’t even touched on how staggeringly diverse each team of mechs is. How each team acts like a completely new toolkit to attack the puzzles. How each team sheds completely new light on the same 8×8 battlefield you may have mastered with a different trio. And even when the completionist has every achievement, there’s a mix-’n’-match-the-mechs-mode (not called this, thankfully) where you can experiment with ever more iterations of teams, and see how they interact.

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It seems peculiar that a game that has done such a good job of avoiding luck and percentages, has included one really frustrating dice roll that feels completely incongruous with the rest of the system. Grid defense is the possibility of your buildings to resist a Vek attack, and you can increase this stat from the default 15% up to 25%. But this percentage never feels high enough to be consistent, and while, yes, it does feel great when your cities clutch a resist at just the right moment, it never feels deserved or tactical like the rest of the combat does.

This in turn, makes it extra frustrating when your pilots receive the ‘Grid Defense +3%’ in one of their two skill slots, because it feels like a wasted spot. In contrast to the named pilot’s specials that add yet another layer of strategy, all of the acquired skills feel flat and conventional. Developing any character properly though, with real personality or skills, would break the difficulty at the start of your next game because of the timeline mechanic. Ultimately the mechanic seems like the worst of both worlds: constraining the skills system without offering anything back mechanically or tactically.

Occasionally you land on an easy looking map that, despite first appearances, turns out to be impossible to complete without losing lives. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, the fact that the system is quite narrow and puzzley, it can at first feel about as fair as the Kobayashi Maru. In some ways, though, the game is a victim of its own success here. The ecosystem has been well designed, with so much depth, you feel like somewhere in there, there’s that one perfect solution every turn.

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These complaints amount to minor personal niggles when understood in the context of such an impressive, delicately refined system. Even though there are plenty more hours for me to sink into this version, I am very greedily, already hoping for an enhanced edition. (And desperately praying for a port to Android).

Keep reminding yourself that ITB was never meant to be a perfect puzzle with just one solution, and you’ll realise that what it is instead, is a damn near perfect strategy game.

