Posted on: March 31, 2018
Igraine
Verified ownerGames: Reviews: 38
Not FTL
It's natural to compare Into the Breach with Faster than Light, the studio's previous game. So here, I'll do the same: ITB is not FTL. Beyond a similar excellenge in design, ITB takes a different approach; It's a Turn-Based Tactics game which gives a very high degree of information to the player: they player knows the enemy's moves ahead of time. While in FTL the player struggles with random elements and incomplete information, ITB gives players almost complete information, with relatively low randomness. This allows ITB to ramp up the difficulty, and ask the player for careful, well-thought-out action. It's more like chess with Jaegers and Kaiju; however, since the game gives away the opponent's future moves, you don't have to be a grandmaster to play it well. Or, in the approximate words of Beaglerush (twitch.tv/beagsandjam), _every_ turn is like that do-or-die turn in XCOM, where you _can_ win, but only if you discover and make the perfect sequence of moves. Still, from time to time, the game will present an impossible turn, expecially on Hard difficulty- where you _will_ take some damage, no matter what you do. This is, in my opinion, what makes the game feel real and threathening: no training wheels. These can be countered by learning to deploy the troops better and give your mechs better loadouts. In short, even impossible turns feel fair, since they _can_, ultimately, be controlled by better player action. In conclusion, the game and gameplay are both amazing. After Achron and Into the Breach, I'm hopeful temporal gameplay mechanics can blossom out. My experience: unlocked all the squads, beaten the game (4 islands) with the first half of them, and a chaos random squad, on Normal. Beaten the game 3 times on Hard. Love Silica + Electric Whip .
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