Into the Breach

The game is really great and is a lot of depth and replayability, however after you have played it for say 10-15 hours intensively you kind of "get it". At that point I felt done with the game, I had already beaten it with a few different squads and even thougn the squads playstyles differ greatly it didn't feel fresh enough to keep playing. I came back to the game again after 3 month or so and absolutely loved it, I remembered the gist of the game but it took a little bit of time to wrap my head around it and still took another 10 hours or so until I felt that I was done with the game. For me at least its not the kind of game that has endless of playtime potential inteisvely, rather it feels like a comfort game you can always come back to when you don't know what else to play. If you take a break from it and come back later it will always feel like a great experience to play it again.

You pilot a squad of mechs to destroy bugs, save lives, and achieve optional objectives. What's so hard about that? And... you even get to see your opponents' moves, Piece of cake, right? Not so fast! Except in the easiest difficulty it never seems like you have enough mechs to do everything. So you have to make hard choices, Do you go all out to kill the bugs you are facing now at the expense of the objectives? Do you prioritize stopping the bugs from emerging so you aren't overwhelmed later? Do you kill a bug and let another attack a building, possibly costing lives and reducing your power grid? And even beyond the individual battles to win or lose, you have other choices. Each island is divided into zones that are revealed as you battle in adjacent regions. And you only get to battle in four regions before the final showdown on an island. So you have to choose battles not only based on objectives and rewards, but also based on which zones may be revealed. And you can choose which and how many islands to save before the final planetary showdown, which naturally scales in difficulty. And you can buff your mechs (which don't carry over between planets) and unlock pilots (which do carry over). After you complete a planet, win or lose you get to send a pilot back to use in the next planet, or you can choose one of your unlocked pilots. Finally, as you complete achievements you are able to unlock different mech squads with very different abilities. All of this adds to the variety and replayability and gives the game tremendous depth. Did I mention that it is a lot of fun as well?

A very cool core game mixed with an cool mech/pilot upgrade and mix. Many unlocks, different maps and because of the roguelike mechanism every playthrough feels like a riding on an edge of a razor blade. A single failure can lose the whole war against the bugs. Many unlocks during the game progress. And: Controller-Support! So you can play this (cheaper!) GOG-Version with a Steam-Link perfectly with a controller on your couch. Tested it.

Into the Breach keeps the fun parts of the previous game of its creators (rich arsenal with different instruments for havoc and destruction, nice plot, multiple unlockables that make replaying the game again and again worthwhile), but it doesn't take that much time and effort to get to the final battle (and, in many cases, lose it). Also, turn-based tactical combat! And the mech pilots, each with his/her/robotic personality and reactions, and with their special abilities. Another thing I like is that you can make your own custom team of mechs from those you've unlocked. But enough talk. Let's drop onto the islands and kick some Vek butt. Excelsior!

I was sad hearing that they weren't making FTL2, but after playing this game for 10 min I realized this dev team is absolutely outstanding when it comes to making original and very deep games with crazy amounts of replayability. Unlike FTL this game is more about strategy and less about “random LOL moments” and I understand this might put some people off, but for all the people who complained that FTL was too random or that there’s too much RNG, this is what you NEED to play. This game has zero RNG and every move you make has a huge impact on the outcome. I for one am a huge fan of real-time-with-pause type of games and I’m very bad at puzzles, but still I was hooked for 3-4 hours non-stop when I started playing this. It is a testament to this team’s skill as developers and designers that they can make such addicting and fun games, even when they make puzzle-turn-based-strategy games like this that require a lot of brainpower. I hope to see more soon from them and thank you for another great game. Highly recommended to anyone, especially if you like TBS.