'Into The Breach' Review Roundup: Hard Decisions Keep the Game Interesting
"Into The Breach" is Subset Games' version of chess, in a nutshell. The tile-based isometric strategy game plays in bite-sized missions on maps no bigger than eight by eight, but the game manages to be as deep and atmospheric as most sci-fi strategy games out there today.
The seemingly endless replayability of the game mostly comes from the fact that each map is randomly generated.
"Control powerful mechs from the future to defeat an alien threat. Each attempt to save the world presents a new randomly generated challenge in this turn-based strategy game," Subset Games summarized "Into The Breach" in a couple of sentences on their Steam page, but the description barely scratches the surface in this case.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
The game is not easy by any means, and just like the much-lauded "FTL" from the same developers, "Into The Breach" is all too willing to punish players for their mistakes or just plain bad luck.
As Ars Technica's Sam Machkovech recently found out, this approach, when applied to short missions on tiny maps, lets players fail again and again until they get that well-earned victory in the end.
The maps are less of a battlefield and more of a very intricate puzzle, one that demands the player balance their objectives with every move. Unlike the usual strategy game where a player can just go all out against the enemy army, the first priority in most stages is to preserve any buildings and the civilians in them, as Engadget's David Lumb noted.
"You are just being a hero in giant mechs, but having a piece of the game requires you to make difficult decisions, and that there are consequences to your decisions, I think makes for interesting gameplay," Matthew Davis, programmer for the game, described the hard choices players make with every move.
"Into The Breach" currently has a score of 92 on Metacritic, a score that earns it "Universal Acclaim" on the review aggregation site.
