Into The Breach, from the developers of FTL, is strategy tactics game wrapped in a rougelike progression system. In many ways, fans of FTL will feel at home with its roguelike mechanics and familiar art style, but the turn-based strategy tactics portion is also great on its own merit.
The best part about it is how it took lessons from games of its genre and made an arguably better combat system than what inspired it.
XCOM and XCOM 2, while highly regarded for bringing back the classic strategy games from the 90’s, have its pitfalls. One is how reliant the whole combat system is to random number generators (RNG). In short, each time you take damage or deal damage, there’s a game of dice happening to determine if it connects or not.
It’s a great way to make players do risk assessments and weigh in if a move is worth it, but it also won’t stop you from re-rolling old saves and getting frustrated that RNGesus did not grant you the blessing and annihilated your squad thanks to random chance.
Sure, the percentages are sneakily always in favour of the players most of the time, but it still can lead to awful moments.
In Into The Breach, the combat system is all based on hard numbers. You know exactly what number of damage you will deal, and exactly what the enemy is attacking and how much damage it will cost. You can view what order the enemy and hazards will play to further confirm that your chain reaction of moves act as it should, as you can set up so that enemies are attacking each other or block the spawn points, all being marked clearly with the UI.
There are still RNG at play- the ever-important grid defenses has a chance to negate a damage, hazard tiles and the maps themselves are all randomly generated. But you have more control of your actions as you know exactly what will happen the next enemy turn which in turn makes you play more tactically as a result.
An unpopular addition to XCOM 2 was, of course, the turn timers. To keep the pressure of being the underdog guerrilla resistance, you are constantly pushed to finish the objectives on time. The reasoning behind this was to encourage players make mistakes which will lead to more interesting decisions. But there is a part of the playerbase that would rather mod the turn timers out.
How Into The Breach handle this issue? Instead of a turn timer that ticks down to failure, you have a turn timer that literally ticks to victory. And it’s not just a matter of semantics. The kaiju-like Vek aliens will never stop coming. The whole game’s concept of “Defend The Grid”, with the grid being the building housing what is left of the civilians in this world, is hammered down due to the onslaught of Veks pouring in each turn, which can overwhelm you early on.
So seeing the counter going down until the word “Last Turn” display is a sight of relief. You might even wish it counted down faster.
This is not a knock on the XCOM series, but it’s good to see new ideas and approaches being used to shake things up. That’s how a genre should grow, and Subset Games have certainly took notes from the biggest game in the stable.
Stay tuned for our full review of Into The Breach soon.