Some of us desperately want to know what it feels like to pilot an enormous mech, jetting through fields and acid wastelands and wasting bugs by the dozens. We want to imagine the rush that comes with this righteous violence. We want to feel the surge through our arms as we fire projectiles at giant acid spewing insects and punch through them with the force of a locomotive. There are games that can attempt to mimic this experience; games that have us shooting at an onslaught of disgusting inhuman things. They have narratives like action movies that follow us from mission to frantic mission and they have cameras that exist in place of our eyes.
There are also games like Go and Chess in which action is slow and thoughtful and in which the narratives are the ones created by our own hubris and lack of thought as players.
Into the Breach, the addictive and often buzzed about tactics game from Subset Games, attempts to bridge the gap between these two concepts but sits squarely in the latter camp. In the process of doing so it revolutionises the turn-based tactics game, however, and will probably be played fondly for however long it is available for purchase.
Most turn-based tactics games, like their centuries-old forebears Go and Chess, have varying lengths that lean towards the very long. After four or five turns a game of Chess is usually just getting started unless players are matched unevenly. Every battle in Into the Breach lasts no more than four or five turns. And unlike a game of Chess, which presents you with 16 pieces with differing movesets and a nearly infinite number of options, Into the Breach presents you with a measly three pieces. These pieces have wildly different but complimentary movesets, generally one with a ranged attack, one with a melee attack, and one sort of wild-card that primarily pushes and pulls from an unobstructed distance. This all might make “Into the Breach” sound like an oversimplified, shortened version of much more difficult and complex games, but in reality Into the Breach is equal parts fun challenge and frustratingly difficult, especially the first few times you attempt to play it with any given set of three pieces.
In Chess there aren’t other sets that allow the player shoguns and ninjas in place of knights and rooks. But Into the Breach is high octane Chess with time travelling space marines and heavy artillery, so there are other, unlockable sets of pieces that bestow different options upon you although they often feature vaguely similar roles. Maybe there’s a plane that cancels enemy moves instead of a melee mech. A plane sounds like it would be completely different from a punch drunk Gundam, but in reality they fulfil similar needs. A melee mech has a wide range of movement and kills things to stop them from acting. A jet plane has an even wider range of movement and kicks up dust to stop things from acting.
Into the Breach isn’t so much a game about mowing through insect hordes as it is a game about stopping those insect hordes from acting. Because you are strongly incentivised to prevent attacks on buildings, it is always a better move to just push a creepy crawly insect away from the power plant its trying to destroy than it is to deal damage to it if it can live to destroy the power plant. There is a stressful calculus in Into the Breach that causes you often to decide whether you’re better off allowing a building to take a hit or to throw one of your three mechs into the line of fire. It isn’t a fatuous decision either. If one of your pilots dies in a run through Into the Breach, they die for the remainder of that run. And pilots are great. They have personalities. I usually find myself playing as Henry Kwan, an arrogant sonofabitch who begins battles by telling whoever is around that the time for autographs is later and who is always ready to blame someone else when a kaiju scorpion impales an apartment complex with its stinger. The mech piloted by Henry also gets to ignore enemy placement when it moves, which is extremely useful in a melee mech that you need to dash around the board every turn.
There is a story somewhere in Into the Breach about swash-buckling time traveller mech pilots who have arrived just in the nick of time to save the world from the acid-drenched mantises and projectile shitting cockroaches that are trying to destroy it. But who cares? No one needs to know that the Queen on the white side is fucking the Bishop on the black side and that she hides it from the King for the sake of their children and that the King is confused as to why the black side is invading his kingdom and trying to corner him as they slice through the Pawn peasants he uses as human shields. The story of any given play through Into the Breach is one of your own hubris and lack of thought. You could win every time, but you don’t, because you just can’t stop yourself from trying to mow through evil alien insects like a nerdy Ellen Ripley and making dumb mistakes.
This game is loaded with content, including numerous sets of mechs with their own tactics, a bunch of islands that all feature different environmental hazards and even different bug types, and droves of pilots with smirks or sad eyes and abilities to match. But the real hook is that every playthrough is different; battles are pretty much randomly generated although they will follow certain templates. You can also amp up the difficulty, which doesn’t seem to make the enemies smarter but does make them more numerous and thus virtually impossible to beat if you are the kind of person who wants to hate this game and the world it exists in. Because of these things, and because the underlying strategy game is so strong, Into the Breach is pretty much infinitely replayable. It is a steal at the MSRP of 14.99 and it offers near-Hollow Knight value per dollar. If you are into games that force you to calm down and think slowly about every action- albeit in short bursts- you owe it to yourself to get Into the Breach.