LogFAQs > #932532386

#49





Years of release: 2018 (PC/Switch)
Beaten?: Yes

It took me a year before I ended up finally picking this one up, despite the fact that it's clearly up my alley, and I don't really know what I was worried about. I just never felt like I was in the mood for picking up a strategy game like this, and when I had watched brief gameplay videos of it I had made it out in my head to seem a lot more complicated than it really was. When I actually picked it up and played it, I found that it was a lot more simple and accessible than I expected, and unfortunately, a bit less robust. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether or not I liked it or hated it. I ultimately fell on the side of liking it, as 50 hours of playtime attests to.

Into the Breach has a little bit of an Advance Wars-like appeal to it but I guess I'd compare it more to something like XCom? It's a turn-based strategy game in which you control a team of three mechs that jump through a time warp to try to save earth from invading bug aliens before everything's destroyed. You warp into various maps, depending the cities and yourselves from the bugs, trying to protect particular objectives for a set number of turns, usually 4. The gimmick is that the bugs always telegraph their attack patterns, allowing you to respond to what they're about to do - you have all the time in the world to coordinate your mech's three attacks so that they neutralize the incoming threats as efficiently as possible. The game is VERY focused on positional tactics, not just doing damage, and the most fun ways to win involve putting the enemies in front of each other so that they attack each other.

I should probably move onto hard mode, because normal mode started out pretty easy and has become more or less trivial - once you get good at thinking about the best ways to move your enemies around the map, you can make the best out of very nearly any situation, outside of the rare times that you manage to set yourself up for failure or you get yourself overwhelmed. I keep playing normal mode because I keep wanting to unlock these dumb achievements though.

My frustrations with the game mostly boiled down to some finicky RNG elements - 'time pods', which are basically random treasure chests you sometimes get, are incredibly important resources but sometimes they randomly have an extra weapon or pilot in them and sometimes they don't, which is frustrating, because there aren't enough rewards in this game to ultimately get compensated for rolling bad luck once in a while. I got over it though, as I got better at the game. To the extent that now the game doesn't feel like it has enough variance. It doesn't feel very much like your crew changes over the run - what you start with is pretty much what you get, you'll sometimes pick up some interesting new weaponry but it doesn't always work really well with your setup, or you don't have enough energy to power it. Compared to other roguelike-y games, which I guess this is, this one just doesn't have a lot of variance, I think to its detriment - you never feel like you're like, trying to just 'make it work' with what you get, you have a nearly complete plan of what to do from the outset. Some runs can get pretty repetitive as a result.

But the pros outweigh the cons here, I just happen to be in a complain-y mood about this game I guess. Sometimes that happens when I get further along in my list, because I just like the game so much. The game design here is incredibly sharp and polished, this game feels a bit like a board game with how well calibrated all of the math is, every move you take in this game will feel perfectly deliberate and like it has a purpose, and small mistakes can really hurt you. All of the tactical choices you have to make here are extremely fun, every level kind of plays out like a puzzle - most given turns have a way to get out of them without taking any damage to the city (more important than not taking mech damage, since that repairs, but city damage doesn't), and it can be really satisfying when you see the puzzle-like answer to pushing the enemies around in such a way to avoid disaster. This game can go south pretty quickly if you're not vigilant which makes solid play feel satisfying.

Once I get some of these achievements I want to get I'll start playing on hard and see if that's a little more satisfying than normal, but I think in general this'll be a game I come back to every now and then when I want something to play without too much involvement. It's a good "I feel like having something to look at while watching a youtube video" kind of game, and that's a pretty high compliment! I need those types of games. But I sort of doubt it has hundreds of hours of replayability in it, so it falls short of the higher tiers of my list.