CHENNAI: Six years ago, a two-person studio called Subset Games released a little game called FTL: Faster than Light. It received many accolades and much acclaim, deservedly so, and proved to be one of my favourite games over the next few years.Now, Subset Games is back with their sophomore effort — Into the Breach.
Into the Breach tasks players with fighting off an alien invasion. Well, technically the game starts after you fail to fight off an alien invasion. However, one pilot uses unreliable technology to transport himself back in time to the beginning of the invasion so that you can try again. The aliens are unrelenting and pose many obstacles and challenges. To meet them, you’re granted command of a squad of mechs with which you face off against them on various grid-based maps.
Combat is turn-based, and is reminiscent of classic strategy games such as X-COM and the like; and, like many of those gems of yesteryear, is also brutally difficult. That’s why, should the aliens prove too strong, you can always choose to abandon the timeline you’re currently playing and open a temporal breach back to the start to try again. It’s a neat system, and does soften the blow of failure that more traditional roguelikes deal in by letting you take one of your experienced pilots back with you. You also get one chance per battle to reset a turn, and it’s a testament to how challenging this game is that — although that sounds incredibly powerful — in practice it’s barely enough to keep your head out of the water.
Every round, the aliens telegraph their intentions — maybe this one’s going to target this building while those two try to pincer your artillery unit and the last one’s webbing your frontline brawler so that it can’t move at all. Oh, and the game also helpfully shows you where new enemies will spawn in next round too — but don’t worry, if you manage to block a spawn point with an enemy, you’ll buy yourself some breathing room. The terrain can be used against the aliens as well.
That’s the beauty of Into the Breach — it gives you so much information and so many tools, and then challenges you to find a way out of the never-ending catastrophe you find yourself in. And that’s why this is such an amazing game — you never feel like you lost because of random chance, or the whims of the RNG gods. No, you know that you had everything you needed at your disposal in order to succeed (or at least survive) and you messed up. That’s all there is to it, soldier — open up another breach and try again.
Cleverer people than I have described Into the Breach as ‘Pacific Rim meets Edge of Tomorrow’ and ‘kaiju chess’, both of which are phenomenal summaries of the game. To which I will only add that Into the Breach is, if anything, more addictive than FTL and is a beautiful many-layered masterpiece that I will likely be coming back to for years.
If you’d like to
Play XCOM crossed with a Rubik’s Cube
experience the whole ‘Live. Die. Repeat’ thing in a game
cancel the apocalypse
...you should head Into the Breach!
Arjun Sukumaran
http://goo.gl/uNBWN3
(Arjun is a gamer, book lover and an all-round renaissance man)