Into the Breach

This game is purely amazing! I can't remember a game that took so much of my time! I have finished it many times, with different squads in different combinations, different islands, different difficulties. If you like puzzle solving games (very much real chess-like!) then you'll love this game! Bought it for half price, but now I could pay 200% for it. It's just so good! Would reccomend 11/10 :)

This game certainly offers a very unique form of a turn-based strategy gameplay. In essence, you know your enemy's actions beforehand and try to prevent them or turn them to your advantage. Mostly that means avoiding damage to buildings and your units, as well as some side objectives. You have quite a significant potential array of options, based on your units, terrain, enemies and specific level quirks, but at any given time they are quite limited. This means that any given turn in this game can be perceived as a sort of puzzle where the primary goal is to avoid damage to any structures while the secondary one is to have as much of a benefit on your future turns (by destroying enemies, blocking their spawning, healing your mechs, setting up the battlefield). In a way this can be seen as a set of threats that you have to manage as efficiently as possible to then use spare actions on additional benefits (e. g. killing enemies that aren't directly harmful right now). This can be a fun and enjoyable intellectual experience that is certainly helped by the fact that game is pretty challenging and gives you opportunities to make it even more challenging (by completing additional islands, achievements, or just increasing difficulty). I highly recommend playing it for this. There is, however, a reason I only give 4 stars and that's the amount of randomness. It's not about the results of your actions - you can be sure about those. But the actions of your opponents can make a certain situation with the same set of enemies and objects vary highly in difficulty. An enemy targeting your unit can be solved as easily as moving it away which doesn't even take an action. An enemy targeting a building, however, means that you have to find a way to kill, move or disable that enemy which most of the time means one of your 3 units has to make an action specifically to do it. This doesn't destroy the game for me, but it often harms the experience.

I didn't have this bad case of "just one more turn" since Heroes of Might and Magic III.

It evokes the same feeling of FTL, but is quite a different experience -- and both games are great in their own rights. Just like FTL, you can have a perfect run, and only a short lapse in concentration is enough to bring down the house of cards. But you always feel like YOU could have done something better, and this is what gives this game a "just one more try" quality. Complete with clean graphics, great sound/music, and tight/fun mechanics, this game is an A+. I remember thinking the game was unfairly hard at times. Then when I rethought certain strategies, I found myself going for perfect runs even on Hard mode (which will be challenging). Between turns you will see where your enemies are attacking next. It then falls upon you to find the best way to eliminate them, or sometimes, just control the situation so it doesn't get out of control since you only just need to survive for a certain number of turns. Direct damage is only so effective since often you'll get swarmed. So you'll need to find ways to push enemies to attack each other, block enemies with your own units (leveraging your own health to protect objectives), etc. The mini-scenarios have a lot of variation, so there are effectively an infinite number of scenarios and you'll never replay the same map twice. Also like in FTL there are different mechs, with different abilities, and diffent pilots who have different perks, along with secret characters to unlock. Like I said, this is a great title that I played until I got a perfect run with each squad. However, even after that, you can then build your own custom squads. A must have for any strategy fan.

This game is incredible! It's a turn based strategy game where each play through consists of multiple levels. It's perfect for short breaks to tackle a single level as the game is saved automatically after every turn. It gets addicting once you get the hang of the game. I have over 200 hours of game time! You control giant mech robots and fight different giant bugs on 8x8 grids. The objective is to protect the buildings scattered on the grid and are under constant attack by the bugs. There's so much thinking that goes into every turn as the mechs are often limited in their abilities. Usually they don't deal enough damage to get rid of a bug in a single turn so different tactics have to be applied depending on each situation. Usually position manipulation comes into play here. Your mech may not be able to kill the bug that is threatening a building but, depending on your mech and its weapon, it could push it a single tile making the bug's attack whiff and maybe even hit another bug or block another bug from surfacing. There are over 20 unique mechs to play and even more weapons to equip them with. They form mulitple, preset squads of three, but one can also go with a squad built out of random unlocked mechs or build a custom squad by cherry picking. Grab it and have fun! But be warned that the game is very unforgiving!