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Turn-Based Tactics Into the Breach: Advanced Edition - mech tactics game from FTL devs with Chris Avellone writing

cvv

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Lagi

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Don't listen to Infinitron, buy it on GOGs dildos, support variety and competition. Down with our landwhale overlord!

https://af.gog.com/game/into_the_breach?as=1649904300

On a closer look I noticed Infinitron originally posted a GOG link as well.

This changes nothing.
latest
 
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Mark Richard

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In for a rough one. I overextended myself trying to achieve the bonus objectives and attacked when I should've healed, forgetting the burning status effect continues even after leaving a burning square. One of my pilots is dead and has been replaced by an AI that doesn't acquire experience points. Don't be a dummy like me. And don't call time pods 'tide pods'.
 

Arnust

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And don't call time pods 'tide pods'.
ISN'T IT

Well, if you don't get any pilots you could now use the AI as a kamikaze for the time being. I myself am about to beat the 3rd island, playing in Normal like the big boys. Haven't really got any meaningful drops except two new pilots to replace for the lame guys with helmets and no specials.

EDIT: Aw, nuts. Robot island is bloody tough. At least I got the coins to see how's the Xenith Guard squad.
 
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Infinitron

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https://www.pcgamer.com/into-the-breach-review/

INTO THE BREACH REVIEW

Surely this is where it’ll end. One bug is attacking the train I’m meant to be defending. Another is about to destroy an apartment building. And for every building I lose, I lose another Power Grid point. I’ve only one left and once it’s gone, the Vek win.

If you’ve played FTL, you’ll remember the very particular kind of clammy-palmed panic it’d conjure as you’d face another seemingly no-win situation. Into the Breach will bring that feeling right back, and it’s wonderful. Developed by the same team, Subset Games, Into the Breach is FTL’s long-awaited follow up. It’s built on the same building blocks of roguelike progression, intricate interplays of abilities, and slow, knuckle-gnawing tension, but it also couldn’t be a more different kind of game.

Now, my Lightning Mech could run up to the bug attacking the train and lightning whip it to death. But the attack will chain into the adjacent train and destroy it, too. Every move I try either fails to deal with both bugs or destroys the train. This is impossible. It’s over.

Into the Breach is a turn-based tactics game in which your squad of three mechs is pitted against a swarm of ground-dwelling bugs, the Vek. Each level is played out across just five turns on an 8x8 grid, and your ultimate goal is survive, to build up the strength of your mechs, and to make it to the final denouement, in which you finish off the Vek for good.

Its party trick is that you get to see the moves the Vek will make on their turn. Tactics games are, at their core, puzzle games, but while most involve a good deal of luck and guesswork, Into the Breach’s tactics are tight and controlled because you know the exact results of your every move. You know what the Vek will be attacking, for what damage and in what order. And that evens the odds, even while you’re almost always outnumbered.

You also have amazing weapons on your side. Thinning the Vek’s numbers is always a good idea, but they’re not always about killing, since most can also move them, relocating their attacks. If you’re clever, you can make them attack each other or push them into bug-killing water. There are always many options, but you’re rarely sure you’re making the best ones. This is why, despite each battle taking place on just 64 tiles and across five short turns, I routinely spend 30 minutes on them, agonising over my choices. You will, too.

Wait. What if my Hook Mech pulls the bug attacking the city with its grapple? OK, the city’s still in danger because the bug charges in a straight line, but now it’s sitting a tile away from the bug attacking the train, and… I’m a genius. I move my Boulder Mech in and lob a rock between them, pushing both away so both attacks will hit nothing. We’ll live another day.

One of Into the Breach’s greatest strengths is that while its tactics are exacting and complex, its strategy involves a good deal of choice and variety. Each campaign run takes place across four themed islands. Each island features a set of levels from which you’ll choose four to battle on before playing the fifth one to protect your HQ from a final assault, and each level has different objectives. You might need to protect a coal plant or speeding train, to kill at least seven enemies, or to destroy a dam. If you succeed, they’ll grant certain rewards, either Power Grid points, Reactor Cores (which power up your mechs’ abilities and weapons), or Reputation, a currency you’ll spend on weapons and other gear to equip your mechs for the run.

You don’t lose the game if you fail objectives—only if you lose all your Power Grid—so you’ll constantly be weighing up the pros of one move against the cons of another. When push comes to shove, is it better defend the coal plant in order to win a Reputation point but leave your Combat Mech open to an attack? Or is it better that it definitely survives the level? The Power Grid ultimately defines your fate, so keeping it healthy is top priority, but looking after your mechs is a close second: when destroyed, their pilot is killed, replaced in the next battle by an AI which can’t earn XP and therefore won’t earn extra HP, movement and other abilities. But if you don’t earn better gear, you probably won’t survive the stiffer challenge of later levels. This is a game of hard choices.

After completing your second island, you have the option to go for the final battle, or you can fight on the other two islands to gather more gear, but the challenge scales with how far you get. Into the Breach is easier to finish than FTL, but it’s designed as a score-attack game, with medals awarded for how many islands you liberated before winning, your final score defined by the number of lives you saved. But you’ll also play with a mind to unlocking new squads of mechs by completing special achievements. The squads each have a different focus, so the Rusting Hulks tend to deploy attack-cancelling smoke, while the Hazardous Mechs deal big damage but get damaged back. Each squad is a joy to learn, each battle a new test of your skills. The challenge never stops changing.

For those who loved FTL for its thoughtful and clever design, it’s all here, too. But Into the Breach is a much tighter, more focused game. While there are plenty of weapons to experiment with, pilots with differing abilities to unlock, and level gimmicks to get your head around, you’ll have a very good idea of its breadth in your first run. For some, Into the Breach might lack a sense of mystery and expansiveness, but for me, it’s more than enough to fuel a hundred hours or more of the most consistently rewarding tactics I’ve played in many years.

THE VERDICT
93

INTO THE BREACH
Exacting, agonising, challenging, and intensely rewarding, Into the Breach delivers in the tiniest package the most perfectly formed tactics around.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/02/27/into-the-breach-ftl-sequel-review/

Wot I Think: Into The Breach

into-the-breach-review-620x330.jpg


Look not to what high-speed, turn-based, sci-fi strategy wonder Into The Breach shares with its timeless predecessor FTL: Faster Than Light, but instead to how aggressively different it is. Though they share a soul of permadeath and moment-to-moment dilemmas, entire limbs have been lopped off and casually thrown aside, teeth and hair uprooted and plugged back in at strange new angles, eyeballs moved to places that were never designed to have eyeballs. Not in merely superficial ways either. It has moved from space-bound chaos to ground-based decisions, from spaceship crew management to mech vs horror-bug warfare, even from real-time to turn-based combat.

Yet the really startling change is that, unlike FTL, Into The Breach is rarely a game of chance, of random, cruel loss or sudden fortune, but instead is almost pathologically fair, even if it often doesn’t feel like it. There is no calamity here that cannot be traced back to your own actions. In other words, you’ve only got yourself to blame for the total wipeout of humanity. But this particular end of the world is a glorious one, and one I will happily keep experiencing for years to come.

The setup: Earth is dead, basically. Big ol’ space-bugs killed almost everyone years ago. But it’s not too late to change that. Survivors from the future develop a double-whammy of time-travel tech and giant mechs, enabling them to journey back to the days before total destruction and seek to prevent the bugs from wiping out the last of humanity.

In practice, that’s a great conceit that has very little bearing on proceedings, outside of choosing which one of your mech pilots you can carry over to your next attempt at saving the world. You’ve got a team of hot-shot soldiers and you need to make ’em go splat the aliens – it’s a familiar theme, obviously sipping from an XCOM vein, but giving it a bit of a Japanese monster movie or Pacific Rim remix, thanks to a choice of scale that casts the goodies and baddies alike as beings the size of nearby skyscrapers.

And, crucially, those skyscrapers must be protected, for within them live the last dregs of humanity in this timeline. Simply slaying every bug that spawns on the map would be relatively straightforward, but preventing them from levelling a clutch of buildings in the process is where the real challenge lies. If too many buildings fall across the course of a campaign, so too does Earth. Meeting certain in-mission objectives can replenish losses, but the balancing act is so delicate that one bad turn can erase all gains – and more.

This is all presented as a small-headcount strategy game that’s leaner than Mo Farah on a gluten-free diet. Anything that does not specifically and immediately play into where you’re going to move your three units and what you’re going to make them punch, shoot or shove has been excised. An entire campaign takes about as long as a single mid-game XCOM mission if you’re lucky (and a lot less if you aren’t), while a freshly-brewed pot of tea will still be steaming hot after a single battle.

into-the-breach-review-pc-620x327.jpg


Yet this is not because everything happens at speed – in fact, every mission, hell, every action in every turn of every mission feels momentous, with every action and reaction entirely transparent. It’s just that Into The Breach has aggressively removed all distractions.

You don’t control buildings or support units, just a squad of three very different mechs that attack with chess-like specificity. Mission briefings and debrief are never more than a couple of lines of instant text either side of a mission. Optional objectives never divert you from primary objectives, but instead ask you to fold in an extra element of risk as you pursue them. The entirety of every map is visible from the first turn and the length of it can be crossed in two turns. Skill and equipment unlocks, meanwhile, do play an occasional part, but they’re infrequent and subtle enough to never steal focus from the core objective – to win (or, at least, don’t die).

There’s an argument to be made – a very superficial argument – that Into The Breach is effectively always the same, that it has too few moving parts, that random map layouts can’t save each mission from being, at most, a palette-swap made up of the same few, recurring elements. I rifle through my folder of screenshots to illustrate this post, and without the context of the robots I cared about, the buildings I was terrified might collapse, the victory I was jubilant about pulling off against seemingly impossible odds, they all look meaninglessly interchangeable. Small maps, total unit counts that rarely reach double figures – a small and repetitive thing, surely.

into-the-breach-release-date-620x320.jpg


And that’s the alluring genius of Into The Breach. It deftly flicks tiny switches that have huge effects upon a constant refrain of kill bugs > keep your mechs alive > don’t let civilian buildings be destroyed in the process.

The enemy whose attack can span the length of map, rather than the norm of an adjacent tile.

The weapon upgrade that fires a shot from both the front of rear of your mech and which, if forgotten about, will inadvertently level a key structure.

The tidal waves, earthquakes and airstrikes which remove whole tiles from the map come the turn’s end.

The tiles that burn, the tiles that poison, the titles that drown.

The sub-objective that yields greater rewards if you keep a particular lethal bug alive for the duration (which means shunting it away from buildings, diverting your resources away from killing other enemies).

into-the-breach-pc-review-620x335.jpg


And on and on, these dozens of different possibilities assembling into hundreds or thousands of different combinations, which your brain surprisingly quickly learns to recognise on sight. It also quickly learns that any calamity is its own fault. Unlike FTL, there are no events that coldly swipe away a crew member or drain a resource. If one of your three pilots dies, or if a civilian building is knocked down, or if too many civilian buildings are knocked down, thus triggering the end of a campaign, you always know exactly why.

Yes, sometimes it can feel as though you’ve been placed in an unwinnable situation – those turns that start with all three of your mechs frozen in place by bug-webbing, or with a building you cannot reach in the space of one turn targeted for destruction. A perfect turn is not always possible, but a match with only minimal losses is, and to that end one of Into The Breach’s masterstrokes is that it always shows you in advance what’s going to happen.

When you press End Turn, you do so knowing exactly what’s going to get hurt. Your mechs move first and attack second during their turn, XCOM-style, but aliens always attack first and move second. It’s the simplest-sounding twist on paper, but with a dramatic effect in practice. When you end your turn, every mech or building that you were not able to remove from harm’s way – either by killing or moving the enemy that targeted it – will take damage.

into-the-breach-1-620x320.jpg


You know, full well, when you press that ‘end turn’ button what you have failed to achieve, what you have bungled or, less commonly, how gloriously you’ve managed the situation. There is a growing choice of mechs and mech abilities as you hit certain achievements, but they are just that – a choice, not an upgrade. Decide which particular plates you want to spin, sure, but none of ’em will save you from having to spin in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, I have sworn at this game so often and so viciously, I have felt betrayed by it, I have felt like a fool because of it. But, once the red mist evaporates, I always know exactly why I failed to save mankind. Which makes me determined that, next time, I will know exactly what to do, and I must do so immediately. Sometimes I’m right. Usually I’m not. I always know why.

into-the-breach-podcast-620x330.jpg


There are those games whose technology or setpieces or storytelling I thrill to. Then there are the games where I marvel, most of all, at the elegance of the design, the remarkable precision at which so many interlocking gears are arranged, particularly in something as breezily-executed as Into The Breach. The Spelunkies, the Slay The Spires and, of course, the FTLs. Into The Breach effortlessly joins those ranks, instantly feeling ageless and ingenious, a collecting of long-known designs honed to a glorious sheen.

I am sorely tempted to reach for the word ‘perfect’, and it’s only a slight ennui about the five visual level themes and the repeating incidental dialogue that holds me back from that. (Again, it treads softly-softly in terms of storytelling, but unseen civilians will hail your arrival or a neat bit of a bug-slaying, in charming lines clearly chosen from a very small pool. Then again, the idea is that you’re time-travelling back to do this again and again, which sort of covers that repetition). As it is, let’s just settle for ‘I cannot currently think of any reason why I would ever uninstall Into The Breach.’
 

Jimmious

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
These guys invented the Sudoku of computer gaming. Dunno if I get my point out but it's fucking addictive as hell. Every level feels like a really cool puzzle. Daaayum
 

cvv

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These guys invented the Sudoku of computer gaming. Dunno if I get my point out but it's fucking addictive as hell. Every level feels like a really cool puzzle. Daaayum

Replayability? Are the levels randomly generated? Does it have the coming-back potential of FTL or is it gonna run out of cool content in 5 hours?
 
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don't like deterministic games nor 'elegant' puzzle games. Reminds me of those bland euro board games where you pretend to run a chain of laundromats or something. Feels like playing a crossword or suduku or logic puzzle. I really dislike chess, and overly balanced games in general.

I am sure it is well designed, but that is part of the issue for me. Its the communism of game design theory, where the 'state's vision' (designer's vision) is paramount. That being said I do prefer hand scripted game levels and encounters over randomly simulated events and encounters (in general, but not exclusivly..for example wandering monsters are a useful design feature imo). Its mostly the combat part of the game where I dislike it...

I know many people like it-- and I am sure this game will do well and be enjoyed by many.
 
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Cross

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One of my mechs caught on fire and I wasn't sure if I should spend a turn repairing him and getting rid of the fire. Before I could decide, I used my other mech to break a dam as part of a mission objective, and the water it was holding back flooded and submerged my mechs, extinguishing the fire.

This is a pretty fun game.
 

---

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Lol, I really suck. 3 hours in, and I still haven't beat the first island :negative:

But I can't stop playing, it's so funny :dealwithit:
 

Jimmious

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
These guys invented the Sudoku of computer gaming. Dunno if I get my point out but it's fucking addictive as hell. Every level feels like a really cool puzzle. Daaayum

Replayability? Are the levels randomly generated? Does it have the coming-back potential of FTL or is it gonna run out of cool content in 5 hours?
Im not sure if the levels are randomly generated. If they are its impressive since they seem "handcrafted".
You of course have a lot of things to unlock and generally the game "promotes" score playing
 

cvv

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These guys invented the Sudoku of computer gaming. Dunno if I get my point out but it's fucking addictive as hell. Every level feels like a really cool puzzle. Daaayum

Replayability? Are the levels randomly generated? Does it have the coming-back potential of FTL or is it gonna run out of cool content in 5 hours?
Im not sure if the levels are randomly generated. If they are its impressive since they seem "handcrafted".
You of course have a lot of things to unlock and generally the game "promotes" score playing

Ah, so it's probably the case of "here are the same islands again but now try to be better".

Eh, I prefer FTL random generation tbh. Oh well I'd also prefer a bigger schlong. Can't have everything.
 

Jimmious

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
These guys invented the Sudoku of computer gaming. Dunno if I get my point out but it's fucking addictive as hell. Every level feels like a really cool puzzle. Daaayum

Replayability? Are the levels randomly generated? Does it have the coming-back potential of FTL or is it gonna run out of cool content in 5 hours?
Im not sure if the levels are randomly generated. If they are its impressive since they seem "handcrafted".
You of course have a lot of things to unlock and generally the game "promotes" score playing

Ah, so it's probably the case of "here are the same islands again but now try to be better".

Eh, I prefer FTL random generation tbh. Oh well I'd also prefer a bigger schlong. Can't have everything.
I really dont know, I just lost my first run only :P
 

---

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The objectives are quite differentiated too: protect the moving train, defend the satellite launches, shield the shitty r&d mechs (fortunately not IA-controlled), don't kill that special enemy, etc...
 

---

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Yep, the levels, the tasks, the rewards, are always different. Of course the amount of variables is limited, but the campaigns are randomly generated.
 

Jimmious

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Yep, the levels, the tasks, the rewards, are always different. Of course the amount of variables is limited, but the campaigns are randomly generated.
Yep it's more or less exactly like FTL in that aspect. God damn this might be my GOTY already.
 

thesheeep

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I really like the puzzle-like approach to the missions.
Which is weird as hell, considering that I usually hate nothing more than puzzles in my games.
But in this game, they aren't arbitrary, but develop naturally from the abilities and all the things going on over the turns.
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

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I made into the final fight (you can go there if you have cleared 2 islands) and got soundly trashed there.

Opened Judoka mechs.

Game seems really good so far.
 

Hellraiser

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This game is essentially AI stupidity exploitation repackaged as tactical puzzle gameplay. It is like they tried implementing AI for a turn based tactical game, utterly failed, but figured out they can build a fun game out of abusing that stupid AI. And it actually works as all the repositioning, terrain hazards, friendly fire and similar mechanics combined with the numerical advantage of the Vek and multitude of shit you need to protect, end up with it being a challenge to win despite the simple AI.

That is to say I enjoy seeing giant robots punching giant insects into mountains and the line of fire of other giant insects.

Also the time travelling bit is nice by allowing you to re-use an experienced pilot from a previous failed run.

Not sure just how much content this has. Four corporate islands, if they are always of the same type, seems a bit too little. That is I would not mind just max four in a run if they were four out of a larger pool for more randomness. Also the objectives seem a bit repetitive.

I wish I could play this game on my phone, as this is the type of game ideal for a longer commute (ditto for FTL) and would actually work with a touch screen.
 

sser

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All the islands are optional - you distance yourself how you want, by going to 2, 3, 4 or four in total. It's part of the achievements/coin system as well.
 

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