Weekend Replay: Into the Breach is my Kind of Tactical Strategy Game

Weekend Replay is exactly how it sounds. I will recap on games I’ve spent my weekend playing. This will get me to write more and hopefully be much more confident in them. Let’s not waste anymore time and get into the Weekend Replay.

Into the Breach is a Rogue-like, turn-based, strategy game made by the developers of FTL: Faster Than Light, Subset Games. I haven’t played FTL but, I’ve always been curious about it. FTL had a lot of the components I was looking in a rogue-like – the randomness of the encounters and obstacle of maintaining the ship makes the replay value greater. All the articles and reviews from various gaming sites say that both FTL and Into the Breach are completely different games but retain the satisfaction of the progression. When I booted up Into the Beach it wasn’t what I expected.

My first defense against the Vek (giant insect aliens) was successful, however there were many things that I didn’t consider. First is the mission and the rewards you get from them. Choosing a mission is crucial for the long run – it determines how much upgrade points you gathered, which abilities can be active, and how much health and movement a mech has. This took me a couple missions before I understood the RPG systems, I reset a playthrough to bring back a pilot thinking I can upgrade mechs but that’s not how it worked. The only way to use reputation points are when an island is secured. When I figured how the system worked it made my other runs much easier -- there were more abilities at my disposal, more of my mechs had more health and movement.

The moment this game clicked with me was when, well It was many moments, but all came to a deciding move. Like FTL, Into the Breach has moments in which makes the player feels amazingly smart. All the enemies have a set ability, and movements in which can be indicated. There is no randomness in the enemies which creates this feeling of a chest game – you can always predict the next turn if you examine the field thoroughly. Executing a carefully planned and wiping the whole field is the best feeling in a video game.

When I first heard about this game I wanted to like it, but from all the grid-based tactical games I’ve played none never clicked. However, the more I heard about the game the more intrigued I got. Thinking this as a sci-fi Chest match instead of a XCOM or Mario Rabbids game sold me. All the randomness of abilities and attack can be frustrating even if you have the perfect plan it can be screwed over with a miss. But the way combat works in Into the Breach all that random element is removed creating that Ah Ha! moment more frequently which keeps me coming back.