Into the Breach

cute turn-based battelfields are so intelligible you can observe em for a few seconds and then concieve a plan with your eyes closed. this gave me a strangely satisfying feel. wow. make me a dev and I won't know how to make this game any better. maybe fully customisable and scalable UI. Like 20% smaller from the fullsceen mode. But it's mostly me being a UI freak, games already looks neat. at first I thought that Into the Breach is too niche for me to have fun, but strangely it's imagery haunted me for days and made me to give a try )

This is what away missions in FTL couldve looked like if the two games were combined. The game is similar to chess with most problems having a solution and each set of mechs you play with have a different style of solving these.(you can also mix these sets in a chaotic way) There is a small element of luck to the game because of the RNG but I think the game AI does a good job of getting around that in most cases and present challenges that are fair and solvable. The game also has an element of strategy : thinking how to spend or conserve resources and energy. overall highly addictive game so need to watch not to overdo it.

I'm a big fan of tight, spatial tactical combat games (X-Com, the old Incubation, Banner Saga, even some RPGs) and this scratches that itch very nicely. It's a challenge, but can be learned: I started out losing hard, and then got the hang of it. The tactics are interesting and enjoyable to figure out. There's a puzzle element in some missions, but this really come from the mechanics of the basic game, not gimicks. Replaying with different squads is fun as well -- not something I typically say.

I have ~80 hrs on this game. It's one that I play for a week or two then move on to other things but I always come back to it and every time it's great. The challenge is consistent and delivered well, very balanced, an element of luck but not too much emphasis on it. After staring at a board for 10 min, I'll think the enemy has me by the throat, but then "oh wait, I can move this one here and....". It's solving a similar puzzle 100 times over but every time it's great. And the variety of mechs to unlock and play with keeps things fresh. Highly recommend, especially if you like FTL

How hard can it be? You manage a group of pilots in big machines fighting against a group of enemies. Everything the enemy will do is shown on screen. Where will it attack, how much damage will it cause? How much collateral damage, where are new enemies spawning, what buffs and ability are active? Well, everything above and more is shown on screen before you make your move. You got infinite time to figure it out. So how hard can it be? It turns out to be pretty damn hard. My experience on normal difficulty as someone who doesn't play many strategy games: - This game is pretty hard in the first few hours but after about 6 hours of playing it "clicked" so to speak and from that point I managed to clear every mission and earn all the bonus objectives (perfect island scores) in one playthrough. - Some of the mechanics are obscure and only revealed through trial and error. - The better you get, the more upgrades you can acquire, making the next few missions even easier.