Into the Breach

This game has unique chess-like gameplay mechanic, and I would say it is even not a typical TBS game, but rather a puzzle. You always have squad of 3 mechs that have some mechanics. You have to combine mechanics to kill enemies, block their spawning or prevent enemies from hitting energy cells. Mechanics can be empowered between missions (in most cases just bonus +1 damage, +1 range, or + HP to mech). Your goal is to beat at least 2 islands (about 12 missions) and then final mission. Then the game repeats from the beginning, but you can unlock new mech squads with different mechanics (all in all the game has 8 squads plus plenty of community-made that you can add). This is basically all that you can find in the game. If you are fan of chess, the game will hold you for several evenings, but not more. Personally I expected much more content and replayability from it, and in the end found it to be too repetitive. You can beat the game completely within 1 hour (I once did it within 40 minutes, and my first complete walkthrough took about 2 hours). Overall, it is fun experience that you could hardly find in any other videogame (well, except chess, probably), but I would not recommend to buy it if you expect a real videogame and not a demo-version of neat mechanics.

The game provides myriad tools to reposition, deny a turn, get them to kill each other, or just directly devastate your foes. The achievements are generally enjoyable to chase and led me to 100% the game. I would say around 15 hours you've seen everything the game has to offer in terms of depth and complexity. Rolling a murder squad of custom laser mechs, or taking the repair-on-kill mech, or any number of combinations can make the game laughable with the custom squads. Subset Games carefully balanced for the named squads and made it a hoot on random to boot; with two random roll options to preserve balance or throw caution to the wind. Always outnumbered, it is up to you to turn the tables on these mindless bugs with your wits and your toolbox.

In my opinion it's well worth getting if you like rogue likes and puzzle games. It's one of those games you can keep coming back to, and it's still being updated after all this time which is pretty great.

Game's absolutely brilliant. If you are a fan of challenging yet, simple strategy games, you will be amused by this masterpiece. Add the appealing pixelart style, unsetteling music and purely genious idea for gameplay, and you have an experience like non other, which you can play for probably hundreds of hours. PLEASE give this game a go, it definitely deserves it!

Into the Breach is often described as being in-between chess and tactics games. Being more familiar with the former, I enjoyed this somewhat. The added certainty created by ItB's telegraphed attacks allows for an enjoyable puzzle-solving mentality. Moving enemies around to miss their targets or hit each other is an unexpected, yet enjoyable mechanic. When combined with the numerous goals to aim for, Into the Breach elegantly captures one of the key joys of chess - 'When you see a good move, look for a better one'. My biggest gripe with the game is that it is too easy. ItB's ensures that you are never truly overwhelmed: there's some way out of any predicament with no (or few) losses. This design philosophy makes sense if you only play to get the best outcome in the current turn but fell apart when I played more strategically. Even the modicum of strategy I used (playing for initiative, controlling the centre, restricting the Vek's movement), lead me to a victory on my first playthrough on Hard (second overall), never having less than 4 power until the final island. Ultimately, Into the Breach's amalgamation of genre leaves it without a compelling hook. Not intricate enough to be a compelling puzzler, but too solvable and forgiving for me to want to improve at it.