Backlog Beatdown: Going into the breach with Into the Breach

I picked up Into the Breach roughly a year ago, having been made aware of it by the adverts on the Steam info page for FTL: Faster Than Light (both games have the same developer,) and an article on Rock Paper Shotgun where Into the Breach was at the top of its list of the 50 Greatest Strategy Games. I was intrigued by the idea that a game stripped back to the essentials of what makes a strategy game should be such a compelling experience.

Artillery blasts are always fun...

Into the Breach is an absolutely brilliant game. It is a turn-based strategy game where you control a squad of three “mechs,” who have gone back in time to free what is left of the planet from the Vek, an alien race of giant insect-like monsters who are destroying what remains of the planet’s population. The game presents you with four themed islands, which have several stages you must get through in order to clear the island and defeat the boss – usually a variation on an enemy you’ve already fought with more health and a different colour palette. The mission takes place on a 16x16 square grid and is usually quite simple: Stop the Vek from destroying too many civilian buildings, as they are forming a power grid that powers your mechs. What’s great about the battle system is that your mechs move then attack – the Vek attack, then move, then telegraph their next attack. Once you realise that your attacks move the Vek when they hit, you discover that this is your opportunity to strategically plan your moves so that the enemy does as little damage as possible. If enough of the power grid and at least one of your mechs is still operational at the end of four or five turns, you win the battle.

Don't think I've used this weapon before...

Variety is added to the missions by completing additional objectives: Protect specific buildings, destroy certain parts of the environment, avoid killing a ‘Volatile’ Vek that will explode if it takes enough damage are just a few. Your reward for completing these is either more power to your grid, or reputation points that can be spent at the end of an island to kit out your mechs. Once you’ve cleared at least two islands, you can attack the Vek on their base island, and if you can beat that mission you win the game. This mission scales in difficulty based on how many islands you’ve beaten, so you can’t fully level up your pilots and kit out your mechs and hope for an easier time – it’ll be a challenge either way! The game takes an hour to two hours to beat, and there is a plethora of stuff to unlock as you’re going along; I’ve beaten the game, but it will take much longer than that to complete!

The Final Mission is a blast!

The graphics are of a 4^th/5^th (console) generation pixel art style; it doesn’t look particularly special, but it will still look that good in ten years! The sound effects are of a similar standard, with the exception of the soundtrack. The music in this game is wonderful; it strikes the balance of being atmospheric and ambient enough to support the game without getting in the way of the action, but memorable enough to stick in the mind long after you’ve finished playing. Subset Games have a very talented composer in Ben Prunty!

Into the Breach is an excellent game with a lot to offer. While the fact that it is a turn-based strategy game might limit the appeal initially, its presentation makes it accessible to most people. The interface is fine; there’s very little clunk and it doesn’t take you long to figure out how everything works. There is a deeper plot than the one suggested, but apart from the fact that most of the characters have quite distinct personalities, you’re left to discover the intricacies of the plot on your own. The game allows you to uncover its weapons, upgrades and ideal paths at your own pace, and your reward for doing so is addressing the challenges the game presents using whatever option it gives you on each run. A fine game, and one that everybody should at least try.

Final Score: 5/5: Beyond excellent. 
 

Last Week's Games: Into the Breach, X-COM: UFO Defence, Sega Megadrive and Ninja Gaiden 3

The first thing I did in the week was beat Into the Breach for the first, and hopefully not last, time. I’ve written the review for it and it’s coming out on Friday, but I thought at this point I’d make a few additional remarks that I didn’t think fit the purpose of the review:

Always a fun time splattering bugs...

It came to my attention, I can’t remember how, that the scope of the game was quite a bit bigger than what we eventually received. There was supposed to be a much deeper strategic element to the whole campaign, with some XCOM-style base management in it. However, at some point the developers had to have a very difficult conversation when it emerged that those wider elements of the game just weren’t any fun. It was just bulk, micro-management, padding out the game, and their play-testers weren’t enjoying it. So, the decision was made to scrap those elements of the game and make a game based almost entirely around the tactical game I’d been enjoying. I’ve got a lot of respect for decisions like that; it’s never easy to look at something you’ve been working very hard on over months and years and decide that it’s not up to standard and needs to be shelved. Maybe we’ll see those ideas come up in a later game, I don’t know. But it was a brave decision to chop out a lot of the game’s intended content to make a better game, so well done on that.

After XCOM Enemy Unknown it was surprising
how squishy these soldier's were...

Elsewhere, I had a go with the original X-COM game. On the icon on my laptop it’s called X-COM: UFO Defence, but I know it better as UFO: Enemy Unknown. I’ve always enjoyed the X-COM games, Enemy Unknown and Interceptor were my favourites, but playing it back twenty years later I couldn’t get quite as in to it as I had been before. Maybe it’s a bad time for me to be throwing myself into another long-form strategy campaign, maybe it’s because the interface really hasn’t aged that well and I’m getting frustrated at losing soldiers and battles because I’m getting the implicit rules of the games wrong, but it wasn’t happening for me that night.

Eternal Champions. Another tough one!

Kirsty bought me an ATGAMES Sega Megadrive Plug & Play for Christmas in 2017, and a few nights ago I finally got around to having a go with it! It’s got quite a few games on there, many that I can only describe as “The Usual Suspects,” (Sonic, Golden Axe, Columns etc) plus several arcade games that I’ve never heard of. I had a go with Comix Zone, Mortal Kombat and Eternal Champions, perhaps because I just wanted to beat something up after the complexity of some of the other games I’ve been playing. Unfortunately, these were all games that I’d either owned or borrowed in the past, and because of this, I realised that the emulation wasn’t quite on point. The games were playable enough and I had a decent time, but the music and sound effects were all about three semitones too low, and with Comix Zone in particular, it made the music in the game sound horribly out of tune. But it’s a fun enough time, and I’m sure I’ll give it another go in the future.

No idea who this is but it took a few goes to beat...
Him? Her? I couldn't tell. The sound was down on the TV.

Finally, I had a go with Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge on the Wii U. I’ve played a couple of Ninja Gaiden games in the past, but this is the first time I played one in a while and I’d forgotten how brutally difficult they can be! At this point I’ve just about got past the boss on the first stage. It’s a strange one because the game seems to want you to learn all the moves and the combos when you just want to be mashing buttons, but there’s a sense of satisfaction when you analyse the attack patterns of the bosses and work out the best strategies to beat them. Nonetheless, the game is brutally hard! We’ll see if I can see this one through to the end, but it’s always good to play a game I’d never played before.

I’ve also installed Elder Scrolls: Arena, so we’ll see what next week brings!

Last Week's Games: Uncharted, Into the Breach, The Witness and Pathfinder

After the previous post’s self-serving revelation that I should be getting on with beating some of these games I’ve been buying had gone live, I went back to my Xbox 360 to try to reach the end of Army of Two; a game that you’ll remember I played over the summer. I knew I was up to the last bit and it shouldn’t have taken me too long, however I ran into a rather fundamental issue: My Xbox 360 broke.

What’s happening is the controller isn’t connecting to the console. (This is happening with both controllers we own. “Try a different controller” is the first thing that comes up on every bit of advice I looked up. I tried. It didn’t work.) It’s still turning the machine on, but not connecting to the point where I could control anything. I tried re-synching it; it didn’t work. I tried moving the console and controller around (this has happened before and carrying it around in my backpack apparently fixed it last time!) but still nothing happened. I looked up a YouTube video on how to get at the parts, got as far as taking the side panel off that gives you access to the hard drive, and gave up when I realised that even if I had the screwdrivers I was going to need in order to get at the motherboard, and even if I could access the correct part, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

So, my old Xbox 360 has gone in for repairs; I dropped it in this morning. From what I understand, if it’s a component part that can be replaced then it shouldn’t be too difficult to repair. If something’s gone wrong with the motherboard, they’re manufactured by machines at a micro level so there isn’t much that can be done. To be fair, I bought it in 2012, it was second-hand then and I’ve got a lot of use out of it since; it doesn’t owe me a lot. And it’s not like I’m short of video games to play!

It's well characterised, I'll give it that!

To that end, I decided to play a game that I’d bought for the PS4 nearly a year ago and hadn’t got around to playing yet: Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. This is the first in a trilogy of games in Uncharted: The Nathan Drake collection. I’d seen some coverage of it, and it came across as, rather crassly: “Tomb Raider with a bloke.” And to begin with, that’s exactly what it is, though with a 7^th-gen design sensibility that made the game more like the later Tomb Raiders than the earlier ones. I’m enjoying it so far; the game is fun to play and while it doesn’t look particularly long (apparently, I’m roughly 40% of the way through having just beaten the first bit?) there’s a lot to do. I don’t know what, if anything, the PS4 remaster has done for the quality of the graphics or game but for me it’s all about whether I enjoy it, and at this point, I am.

Massive amounts of Vek and environmental
hazards make this a very difficult mission to beat.

I also played a couple of games on my laptop I hadn’t played in a while: Into the Breach, which I’ve talked about before, and The Witness, which I haven’t. Into the Breach is always a fun game; I really like how it can potentially only take about an hour to get to the final mission so that you’re not bogged down in an hours-long campaign, and I like that the final mission scales up with the rest of the game so it’s not as though you can level up and cheese your way to victory. I haven’t beaten it yet though, as either way it is very difficult. I came to within one turn the last time I tried, but all my mechs got destroyed before I could finish the mission.

These tree puzzles were easy, until they weren't...

The Witness is an odd puzzle game that is about exploring an island solving puzzles on computer screens, such as you might find in a puzzle book. I played it last year briefly during a time where I wasn’t doing the blog and came back to it now because I figured if I have 20 minutes dead time at work I could jump in and do a few puzzles, but I find myself oddly engrossed whenever I put it on and often find myself playing for a long time when I put it on. It’s a weird game, but there’s something quite satisfying about solving the puzzles. I’ve had to look up a guide to find out the conceit of some of the puzzles, but there has only been one so far where I had to look up the actual solution, and even when I found it, I couldn’t see how the clue fit the puzzle!

Fiendish.

Finally, I ran Pathfinder for the usual crew at the end of last month. I had a really good time with it this time; the problem with a lot of the battles in upper-level Pathfinder is the characters often have abilities which trump most of the monsters that you throw of at them. Action economy becomes an issue as well, especially with 5-6 player characters. However, at one point they come across a Forgefiend who can move through the walls and create very difficult environments for them to fight in. Also, it does a huge amount of damage by spewing molten slag out of its belly, which makes me sound quite vindictive, but the PCs have quite high defensive capabilities as well, so getting to a point where I do some damage to them isn’t all that common for me!

I am hoping to get the next edition of Pathfinder again quite soon, but for how often I play roleplaying games and the fact that I’ve got at least another year in Rise of the Runelords, I can’t justify spending the money on it currently. But we’ve got Christmas coming up, so you never know!

Let’s hope next week starts a bit better…

Last Week's Games: Magic Labyrinth, Dark Souls, Into The Breach, Pathfinder

A busy week for me this week! While I played a lot of Horus Heresy: Legions, there’s not much more I can say about it without repeating myself, and I was fortunate enough to have time to play some other games this week:

A magical experience for the whole family.

Kirsty and I played a delightful little board game called The Magic Labyrinth. This game has you controlling little wizards though a grid-board; you roll a dice to find out how far you can move and aim for a randomly-generated magic symbol somewhere around the middle of the board. The challenge comes from the fact that there are walls built under the board, and if the ball bearing that is magnetically attached beneath the board to your wizard falls off because of one of these walls, you have to go back to the start and start again. The first wizard to collect five symbols is the winner. We played a couple of games and had a really nice time; it’s not a deep experience by any means but sometimes we don’t necessarily want to be micro-managing numbers, stats and fifteen different things going on the board, and in those situations games like the Magic Labyrinth are perfect.

A devastating boss fight for parts of your family
you don't get on with and want to punish.

I had a go with Dark Souls for the first time in a while. I’m stuck on the Bell Gargoyle boss monster, with my character having a very light dexterity build. I remember making this character in response to having tried to make a heavy fighter in an earlier play-through, and not having the speed to dodge the gargoyle’s attacks. I can usually beat the first gargoyle down to the point where the second one arrives, but once they start breathing fire, there’s not much I can do and I keep dying on top of the Parish. Nonetheless, it is fun to try, so I’ll keep at it, though I might need to look at a Wiki to find out what I’m missing!

A strategy game for members of your family
who haven't played them before.

On my laptop, I came back to a game I downloaded last year and played for a while: Into The Breach. This is a brilliant turn-based strategy game with rogue-like elements, where you control a team of three Mechs lead by a time traveller to battle the insect-like Vek on the remnants of Earth. There are a number of different time travellers and mech builds to unlock, and the maps are randomly generated so no two play-throughs are the same. In each battle, it is up to you to decide how you’re going to use the resources available to defeat the Vek. The key element of the game is the turn order – When the Mechs take their turn, they move then attack, while the Vek attack then move. The trick is that the Vek telegraph their attacks before their turn, meaning that you can focus your attacks on the one that’s threatening the most, making sure you kill them or eliminate their threat. The mechanics are simple enough and anybody should be able to have a go and enjoy it, but it has a surprising amount of depth. I’ve really enjoyed my time with it this week!

It all seems so long ago, when Goblins were
tearing families apart...

Finally, on Sunday I continued running Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords for my roleplaying group. Most of the session involved the Wizard character desperately trying to find somewhere to sleep so he could get all his spells back. Trouble is, the party were in a dungeon filled with Ogres and Giants, and I wasn’t about to let the party rest in an area if it wouldn’t make sense for them to do so. This meant that they had to manage their limited resources carefully as they tried to find somewhere to take a long rest, which resulted in some more-careful-than-usual planning and experimenting with different spells. The highlight of the session was when the Druid character used Fire Snake for the first time; a brutal spell that inflicts a huge amount of damage. As this is the highest level I think any of them have ever played (currently level 10,) they don’t get to use the big guns very often!

I’m back at work next week, so I’m expecting my time to be limited but I’ll do what I can!