Into the Breach

This game is very addicting, fast paced and cruel. If you like XCOM, it's right up your alley. Beating it really feels good.

今年开年最惊喜的游戏之一，roguelike式的玩法，丰富的要素，16X16方块的多样玩法都使得这游戏从策略战旗类的游戏中脱颖而出，绝对值得一玩。 最后求一波中文版，不为我自己，为了让更多的中国玩家玩到这样一款好游戏。 （We need Chinese version, thank you very much.)

It's the follow up to the one of the greatest indie stories in gaming so it's hard not to have high expectations. In terms of design, it is practically flawless. It's been rightfully compared to chess but if chess had persistence across matches and playthroughs and allowed you to swap out piece types for unique loadouts. The only complaint I have is that it lacks the lasting power of FTL. While many complained unjustly about the magnitude of its RNG, since skilled players can easily still win over 90% of the time, its randomness was definitely core to how much fun it was. There was always a chance that you can come across a ship configuration that allowed you to absolutely steamroll all of the competition and since it could happen within the confines of a normal difficulty setting, it was extremely satisfying. Granted, hitting the opposite pole on the luck spectrum could happen, too, which could be very frustrating and led newcomers to thinking they were worse than they actually were. Once you get all of the achievements, which will give you about 35 hours of very compelling gameplay, you'll feel empty. Playthroughs are fairly predictable and if you beat the curve, it's just not as fun as FTL. Still one of the best indie games made.

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 .

Excellent game that manages to share so much 'DNA' with FTL and yet avoiding repeating any specific mechanics. Also a wonderful demonstration of how to make a great turn-based tactics game *without* random number generators influencing damage / hit probability / etc. (I'm not sure if the spawning and AI behaviour is randomised or follows some strictly deterministic rules).