Into the Breach

This game is cool.

I started off and thought ho-hum, this is fine, but it’s just a grid-based tactics game. A simple one at that.

Then I found myself, playing, playing, playing; the possibilities and strategies of such a simple setup blossomed and captivated.

In the future, ocean levels have risen and humans live on small, corporate-owned islands. To make matters worse, giant alien monsters called vek have appeared and are stomping over any buildings or people in their way. Luckily, a trio of time traveling humans piloting mechs appears to save the day (or not).

You, the player, are managing these mechs. You can choose a pre-set squad of three or mix and match. It starts simple with a mech that can punch aliens, a mech that can shoot aliens, and a mech that can push aliens in the cardinal directions. Other unlockable mechs will freeze enemies, spin them around, teleport them, light them on fire, and so on. This is a very repetitive game so the main source of diversity is how different mech loadouts alter the strategies you employ.

Combat plays out on a grid. You must protect civilian buildings — if they take too many hits, the game is over. You have to start over, almost entirely from scratch, save a single surviving pilot you can choose to blast to the “next timeline” (your next run of the game). In addition to shooting vek, you have sub-tasks like protecting a power plant or destroying a dam. These either allow you to take more hits before game-over or award currency you can spend at the end of an island to upgrade your mechs.

The big innovation here is that every single detail of the vek’s attacks are telegraphed. You see where they are going to attack, exactly how much damage that attack would do, in which order each enemy will attack, where new enemies will spawn, and so on. The UI is very good at communicating this. So if you see a vek is taking aim at an important building, and you can’t quite kill it (numbers are tweaked so that killing all enemies every turn can’t be done), then you could use a pushing attack to move it over a square so it harmlessly shoots a mountain instead. Or teleport it into the ocean. Or move another vek that is attacking first behind it so that it is killed by its buddy before it can attack. Thus each turn is basically a puzzle where you maximize your moves to prevent the vek from doing serious damage.

It’s ultimately very simple. You complete 2-4 islands and play the same final mission every time. Yet the loop is engaging. Even when mastering the game to the point where my runs were successful nearly every time, new mech types or achievement challenges would change it up just enough to be worth another shot. On the cusp of unlocking the final squad of mechs, I can’t see myself playing all that much longer, but for $15, the experience was absolutely worth it.