Into the Breach - Imitate the action of a kaiju

[Bhazor]

From the makers of FTL a new strategy cum puzzle cum rogue like in which a team of time travelling Kamen Riders must battle to save the last of humanity from an invasion of giant monsters.



I've never been that big a fan of FTL. Fantastic core idea but I've always found it both horribly limited in terms of content and heavily luck dependent. Into the Breach seems limited but the nature of the core battles hold much more potential for varied combat. Each turn based battle takes place on a tiny slab of land with a smattering of towns, each town corresponds to a bolt of energy and if you run out of energy the aliens win. The joy of the game though is in the details. Alien's attacks are clearly signposted for the next turn and your attacks will push the target one square back damaging anything they are knocked into. More importantly when moved they will still attack in that original direction which leads to some tactial conundrums of pushing them to harmlessly smash a mountain or overlapping enemies so they kill each other. But if monster kills another you'll lose out on XP for upgrading your pilots.  If a mech is disabled the pilot dies but the mech stays in place acting as an indestructible barrier. Some maps have unique features such as trains to protect or dams that can flood the map extinguishing units on fire and killed ground based enemies.

The whole game has the familiar FTL pacing. Getting bastard hard almost immediately but unlike FTL it always feels like there was a solution possible rather than you were merely beaten by RNG.

All told pretty good 8/10 B+ polite clapping will probably be my podcast/audiobook game for the foreseeable future.

[Twed]

Looks good as hell. Didn't know this existed. Thanks!

[The Boston Crab]

S / ??? / D+

[Hecate]

Enjoyed FTL and advance wars so I was really looking forward to this, bought it the day it came out in February for pc, played it for all of 97 minutes.
It's too much like a puzzle game, it's all a bit "rock, paper, scissors".
Maybe I should give it another try, I didn't give it long but I'm balls deep in dead cells at the moment and I think progear is going to be the shmups subreddit high score competition for September so I'll be diving into that.

[Kryton]

It's a great-time filler and a solid/puzzle strategy with a decent emphasis on working as a team with your three chosen units. I found it quite hard at first but then it suddenly 'clicked' and I sailed through it and haven't gone back to it since, having felt like I've seen and experienced all there is to see. That said, there's some satisfaction to be gained for using the enemies against themselves or chain stunning them or using the environment. But after a while (12 hours) I found it to become a bit samey. I wish it had more island levels.

I prefer FTL.

[The Boston Crab]

I should not have got this but I'm glad I only wasted six quid or so. I can't bear strategy games, clicky clicky, your dad's just got a 386 wow fuckin hell let's play some strategy games. Fuck offfffffffffffff. Real time action or die.

[Hecate]

Hehe, yeah, I wasn't feeling it either. I do really like turn based games when I'm in the mood, usually when I'm really tired, stuff where you only have to control one bloke though and there's not too much actual strategising involved, stuff like Dungeons of Dredmor and Golden Krone Hotel and I do like stuff like Anno 1404 (Ooh, that's going for 2 quid at the minute) and Prison Architect now and then, but yeah actual strategy games where you've got to think and take your time, it's playtime, you can get that to fuck, though thinking about it, I do like playing chess.
I just don't know what I like, but yeah, action for the win.

[The Boston Crab]

It's another for the futuristic retirement home of my fantasies, but I'm really hoping that I'll have decent VR by then to relive this specific period of moaning about something I don't like or really care about rather than sipping at the precious tincture of life which is imperceptibly evaporating before my eye.