Into the Breach Review

An old-school tactical game takes you to the future where the remnants of mankind protect their last bases on Earth from Vek invaders. People cannot afford to lose each other, so they rely on Mechs in this final battle. You control a mech squad sent to fight Vek.

Turn-based games have been mankind’s favorites for centuries (like chess and checkers). It’s considered now that the Golden Era of turn-based strategies ended in the early 2000s, but great games of this sort still pop up sometimes, and Into the Breach is this type. SO come on, command and take them, inhuman invaders, out!

Features and Functions

So, the rest of mankind stands a partly captured archipelago you need to fight back. Each island is split into several locations to free separately. You deploy your mechs there, while some enemy forces have already arrived, and some are yet to come.

Each location has some power stations you need to protect in the battle. If they’re destroyed, your mechs are no more powered, and you lose. Of course, your mechs need protection as well. Some of them have to repair skills, so use it if necessary.

At your turn, you need to move your units to the best position and hit the enemy, unit by unit. As you’re making a move, the tiles where you can run this particular unit are highlighted. The same happens as you aim before making a shot or pushing the enemy. There are different types of impact: some just move an enemy unit, some damage it leaving on the same location, some move and damage at the same time.

Enemy’s move looks the same. As you make your move, you see where the enemy is about to hit and what objects are endangered right now. So you can plan your moves to avoid critical damage. At each new level, the game gets more complicated and brings more variations in your strategy.

Last but not least, nature interferes with your battle too. Water can take over some cells. Forest fires damage units as strongly as weapons. You must notice that while playing.

Interface

The game is made this dated way on purpose: it’s a kind of homage to those “good old days”. It looks like pseudo 3D: though units look three-dimensional, the battlefield is 2D like a chessboard. The objects are schematic and pixelized, but still very much detailed and easily told from each other.

The animation is rather modest than poor. It resembles those classical turn-based strategies of the golden era that looked quite modern for their time. Anyway, the generation that appreciates Minecraft hardly will think of it as of something bad and unacceptable: it’s just the author’s vision. Even if it matters, gameplay is good enough to pay for that.

Conclusion

This sort of nostalgic, gameplay-oriented games is popular now. Some like its visuals, recollecting the early days; others like it as a retro; some think of gameplay first of all. Into the Breach offers lots of strategical freedom, like this type of game should.

The style of this game has one more consequence many will appreciate: low system requirements. It will run on old machines and won’t take much performance, so you won’t have to kill background processes as some fresh games require.

If you like tactics and strategy, this one is definitely worth trying. Into the Breach can become your game of the week, month, or even year, but not of just a day.